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Asked: 2026-05-15T10:43:49+00:00

I am doing some work for a French client and so need to deal

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I am doing some work for a French client and so need to deal with accented characters. But I’m running into a lot of difficulty, I am hoping the solution is simple and that somebody can point it out to me.

The string: La Forêt pour Témoin
is converted to: La For? pour T?oin

Note the missing character following the accented character – the t following the ê and the m following the é.

I have tried using StringEscapeUtils which was successful at escaping some characters, such as ă. I have also built my own escape function which produces the same results (ă will work, ê will not).

private String escapeChars(String string) {
    char[] chars = string.toCharArray();
    String result = "";
    for (int i = 0; i < chars.length; i++) {
        int c = chars[i];
        result += "&#" + c + ";";
    }
    return result;
}

The project is running in eclipse using the App Engine plugin, I cannot narrow down whether the problem is caused by Java, App Engine, or SQLite.

Any help is appreciated.

EDIT: I have found that string are malformed when simply displaying the the request parameter from a form. (ie, request.getParameter(“string”) already has malformed content).

I have tried the meta-tag suggested by Daniel with no success. I think you are on the right track though, the header data of html document follows:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

When accented characters are hard-coded into a JSP they are displayed as intended.

EDIT: I have also added <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> to the very start of the page.

I am very close to a solution. I have found that if I change the encoding of the page from within the browser form data is passed to the server properly. I cannot figure out how to make the browser auto detect page encoding.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

RESOLVED: I couldn’t work out how to make the browser auto-detect UTF-8 encoding which java defaults to. So I have forced character encoding to ISO-8859-1 using request.setCharacterEncoding(“ISO-8859-1”).

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    EDIT: I have found that string are malformed when simply displaying the the request parameter from a form. (ie, request.getParameter(“string”) already has malformed content).

    This can have three causes:

    1. It’s a GET request and the server isn’t configured to use UTF-8 to parse request URI. It’s unclear which server you’re using, so here’s a Tomcat-targeted answer as example: set URIEncoding attribute of the HTTP Connector in /conf/server.xml to UTF-8.

    2. If it’s a POST request, then you need to ensure that the servletcontainer uses UTF-8 to encode the request body. You can do that by request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8") beforehand.

    3. The console which you’re writing the parameter to doesn’t support UTF-8. It’s unclear which console you’re talking about, so here’s an Eclipse-targeted answer as example: in Window > Preferences > General > Workspace > Text File Encoding set it to UTF-8.

    See also:

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