POST parameters using wrong encoding in JSF 1.2

Question

I\'m having a problem with charset encoding in my web application (JSF 1.2, Spring and Tomcat 7), and I\'ve ran out of ideas of what to test to see where it is going wrong.<

Answer 1

The symptoms indicate that the browser has sent the data using ISO-8859-1 encoding instead of UTF-8. This in turn means that the HTTP response Content-Type header is not been set with the proper charset attribute. In for example Firebug, you can find it out as follows:

You're right that Facelets uses UTF-8 by default. But very early versions of Facelets weren't programmed to use UTF-8 by default. See also among others issue 46 and issue 53. Facelets is currently at 1.1.15.B1.

As to your attempts to fix it, the presence of the XML prolog is not strictly necessary and its encoding isn't used in any way to set the response encoding, it's only used by the XML parser to decode the inputstream to characters. Spring's filter is also not necessary, but that it didn't solve the problem after you added it is enough evidence that it's the client who has sent the data as ISO-8859-1.

Answer 2

BalusC's answer helped me to better understand the problem, but what solved it for me was putting the Character Encoding Filter as the FIRST filter in the chain (putting it above all the others in the web.xml file).

This is the filter I used:

<!-- filter enforcing charset UTF-8 - must be first filter in the chain! -->
<filter>
    <filter-name>characterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
    <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>encoding</param-name>
        <param-value>utf-8</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>forceEncoding</param-name>
        <param-value>true</param-value>
    </init-param>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>characterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

Apparently, the data was read before the parameter was set by the filter. I got the hint from this page: http://tech.top21.de/techblog/20100421-solving-problems-with-request-parameter-encoding.html

Thanks everybody!

Answer 3

Check, if your form has enctype="multipart/form-data".

See this question form more information