What's the difference between “URIEncoding” of Tomcat, Encoding Filter and request.setCharacterEncoding

Question

There may be many ways to solve encoding problem:

• Encoding filter like Spring MVC UTF-8 Encoding

• Setting URIEncoding=UTF-8 in server.xml of Tom

Answer 1

• CharacterEncodingFilter configures encoding of request body. That is, it affects encoding of POST request parameters, etc, but doesn't affect encoding of GET parameters

• URIEncoding is used to specify encoding of the URI, therefore it affects GET parameters

• useBodyEncodingForURI="true" tells Tomcat to use encoding configured for request body when decoding URIs. So, as far as I understand, if you set CharacterEncodingFilter and useBodyEncodingForURI="true" then you don't need URIEncoding.

In practice, you need to two things to solve possible problems with encoding of parameters:

• CharacterEncodingFilter for POST requests

• URIEncoding (or useBodyEncodingForURI="true") for GET requests