Freemarker encoding - question marks in the place of accented characters

Question

I am trying to print accented characters with Freemarker, but in the place of accented characters, I get only question marks. I have verified, that following statement holds

Answer 1

FreeMarker always treats text as UNICODE, so it doesn't generate question marks. Since the accented letters aren't coming from the templates (if I understand it well), it must be your output encoding that's improper. See also: http://freemarker.org/docs/app_faq.html#faq_questionmark

BTW, getDefaultEncoding() has no role in this. That influences the decoding used when you load the templates, but you are saying that the accented characters aren't coming from the template file, also I don't think you can get ?-s from decoding (unless, for invalid UTF-8 byte sequences). As of the encoding of the output, FreeMarker just uses a Writer (as opposed to an OutputStream), so it can't influence that.

Answer 2

For DROPWIZARD Users: passing through the UTF-8 Charset in the constructor worked out:

import io.dropwizard.views.View;

import java.nio.charset.Charset;

public class SomeView extends View {
    public SomeView() {
        super("/views/some.ftl", Charset.forName("UTF-8"));
    }
}

Answer 3

I was able to resolve a similar issue with non-standard symbols (like ™) by setting the content-type on the FreeMarkerViewResolver:

<bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.freemarker.FreeMarkerViewResolver">
...
    <property name="contentType" value="text/html;charset=UTF-8"/>
...
</bean>

Answer 4

For the freemarker servlet there exist init parameters for encoding of template and output. You might compare it with your configuration.