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I cannot find documentation for this environment variable anywhere or what it actually does but it is essential.

3. For translation of inputs coming back from the browser there must be a method that translates from the browser's ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.

  ISO-8859-1

 is the default character encoding for servers and browsers according to the
\[http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt HTTP specification\] section 3.4.1.

  /**
  * Convert ISO8859ISO-8859-1 format string (which is the default sent by IE
  * to the UTF-8 format that the database is in.
  */
 public String toUTF8(String isoString)
 {
  String utf8String = null;
  if (null != isoString && !isoString.equals(""))
  {
   try
   {
    byte[] stringBytesISO = isoString.getBytes("ISO-8859-1");
    utf8String = new String(stringBytesISO, "UTF-8");
   }
   catch(UnsupportedEncodingException e)
   {
    //  TODO: This should never happen. The UnsupportedEncodingException
    // should be propagated instead of swallowed. This error would indicate
    // a severe misconfiguration of the JVM.

    // As we can't translate just send back the best guess.
    System.out.println("UnsupportedEncodingException is: " +
e.getMessage());
    utf8String = isoString;
   }
  }
  else
  {
   utf8String = isoString;
  }
  return utf8String;
 } 

...

public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response, FilterChain next)
throws IOException, ServletException
{
// Respect the client-specified character encoding
// (see HTTP specification section 3.4.1)
if(null == request.getCharacterEncoding())
request.setCharacterEncoding(encoding);

next.doFilter(request, response);
}

...

The suggested solution originates from \[http://people.comita.spb.ru/users/sergeya/java/ruschars.html Sergey Astakhov (all texts are in russian)\] (sergeya@comita.spb.ru)

Important note: Note that this filter should be as far towards the front of your filter chain as possible. If some other code calls request.getParameter (or a similar method) before this filter is invoked, then the encoding will not be set properly, and your parameters will still be decoded improperly.

• • TIP -*

Update the file $CATALINA_HOME/conf/server.xml for UTF-8 support by connectors. Example:

<Connector port="8080"
maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="100"
debug="0" connectionTimeout="20000"
disableUploadTimeout="true"
URIEncoding="UTF-8"/>

Note that this changes the behavior of reading GET parameters from the request URI and will not affect POST parameters at all.