Question

How do you do a file upload in an HTML form without running into mojibake?

I have a form that has three fields:

1. a file field
2. a required text field
3. a text field which accepts Japanese characters

I’ve set up my HTML form with the attribute enctype='multipart/form-data'. But when the form submission fails due to the missing required field, I get redirected to the same page but my 2nd text field (the one that accepts the Jap. chars) is already mojibaked.

However, if I remove the enctype or change it to anything else, and when the form submission fails, I see the Japanese chars as they are (no mojibake). The problem is, if this succeeds, I am unable to read the uploaded files.

Any ideas how to fix this??

Answer 1

I’ve figured it out (by reverse-engineering appfuse (appfuse.org) which does not seem to be affected by mojibake with its file upload form ).

It solved it by setting the charset encoding to UTF-8 in the server side (with spring’s org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter ). Thus, I guess multipart-/form-data really does screw up the character encoding ( or at least for java ).