Jetty response character encoding

Question

How do I set the default character encoding on my responses to UTF-8?

I\'ve tried this

    System.setProperty(\"file.encoding\", \"UTF-8\");
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Answer 1

The Jetty documentation claims it uses UTF-8 by default, but that seems to be a lie. If you do the normal response.getWrite().println("Hello"), then the content encoding is determined as follows.

1. A default mapping from content-type to content-encoding is loaded from org/eclipse/jetty/http/encoding.properties:

        // MimeTypes.java:155
        ResourceBundle encoding = ResourceBundle.getBundle("org/eclipse/jetty/http/encoding");
        Enumeration i = encoding.getKeys();
        while(i.hasMoreElements())
        {
            String type = i.nextElement();
            __encodings.put(type,encoding.getString(type));
        }

The default file is:

text/html   = ISO-8859-1
text/plain  = ISO-8859-1
text/xml    = UTF-8
text/json   = UTF-8

2. Response.getWriter() tries to use that map, but defaults to ISO-8859-1

@Override
public PrintWriter getWriter() throws IOException
{
    if (_outputType == OutputType.STREAM)
        throw new IllegalStateException("STREAM");

    if (_outputType == OutputType.NONE)
    {
        /* get encoding from Content-Type header */
        String encoding = _characterEncoding;
        if (encoding == null)
        {
            encoding = MimeTypes.inferCharsetFromContentType(_contentType);
            if (encoding == null)
                encoding = StringUtil.__ISO_8859_1;
            setCharacterEncoding(encoding);
        }

So you can see that for text/html it doesn't default to UTF-8. I don't think there is a way of changing the default from code. The best you can do is change the encoding.properties file to this:

text/html   = UTF-8
text/plain  = UTF-8
text/xml    = UTF-8
text/json   = UTF-8

But even then if it finds an encoding that isn't in there it will default to ISO-8859-1.