Question

I have a simple jsp form that the customer uses to send us emails. Though on some occasions the emails come through incorrectly formatted with the text =?ISO-8859-1?Q? sporadically displayed throughout the text of the email.

I know that ISO-8859-1 is a character encoding though I am not sure how this error is occurring and have been unable to reproduce this error. I have tried to fill out the form with different character encoding selected using Firefox but still cant reproduce. I have tried to use a laptop with Chinese Win XP language settings to fill out the form but also unable to reproduce this error.

Has anyone seen this error or have any ideas how I could reproduce this this?

Thanks for your comments – I am still looking for a way to reproduce this bug or a reason to why its happening,

the jsp code is straightforward (below) used within a portlet in weblogic 9

<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8"%>
<%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/struts-adapter-html.tld" prefix="html"%>
<%@ page  import="java.lang.String" %>
<html:html>
<html:head>
    <title>Feedback Form</title>
</html:head>
<html:body> 
    <html:form action="/emailFeedback">
            <label>First name </label>
            <html:text property="forename"/>
            <label>Surname </label>
            <html:text property="surname"/>
            <label>telephone number </label>
            <html:text property="telephonenumber"/>
            <label>Zip code</label>
            <html:text property="zipcode"/>
            <label>DOB (MM/DD/YYYY)</label>
            <html:text property="dob" />
            <label>Email </label>
            <html:text property="email"/>
            <label>Confirm Email </label>
            <html:text property="confirm_email"/>
            <label>Subject</label>
            <html:selectproperty="category">
                <html:option value="">select &gt; &gt;</html:option>
                <html:option value="Test1">Test1</html:option>
                <html:option value="Test2">Test2 Payments</html:option> 
                <html:option value="Test3">Test3</html:option>
            </html:select>
            <html:textarea property="feedback" cols="40" rows="7" />
            <input value="Submit your query" type="submit">
        </html:form>
</html:body>
</html:html>

---

The email incorrect email format is below (cleaned of personal data!)

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=0A=0A______firstname:=09=09tes?= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?t=0A______lastname:=09=09KRA=0A___?= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?___Email:=09=09sampleemail@yaho?= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?o.fr=0A______DOB:=09=09=09=0A______?= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?telephonenumber:=05=09454465465456=0A?= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?______zipcode:=09=09=0A______T?= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?hree_No:=09=0907533644972=0A______Feedback:_____=0A______h?= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?sample_test_with_underscores_linking_words?= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?9_14.97=sample_test_with_underscores_linking_words?=

A sample email with the correct formatting is below for reference:

 firstnameame:  John    
 last ame:      Doe
 email:     [e-mail]
 DOB:       01/02/1957
 Telephone :    [phone]
 ZIPCODE:       91210
 Feedback:     
 Correctly formatted feedback.

Answer 1

The ISO-8859-1 encoding only covers the standard Latin characters, not Chinese. To cover Chinese as well as any other characters available at the world, better use UTF-8.

Also see this article for more technical background information as well as several solutions how to configure your JSP/Servlet environment accordingly to use UTF-8.

Hope this helps.