Question

I have a Tapestry application, that retrieves data from a form, writes it to a database and then displays the result. It all works well as long as no special characters (Ä, Ö, Ü, ß, € …) are used.

E.g. the text

TestäöüßÄÖÜ€$ 

will result in

TestäöüÃÃÃÃâ¬$

I guess the problem has something to do with a wrong character encoding setting.

Tapestry java class:

@Component(parameters = {"clientValidation=false"})
private Form form;

@Component(parameters = {"value=someDTO.name"})
private TextField someNameField;

Tapestry Template:

<t:form t:id="form">
    ...
    <t:textfield t:id="someNameField"/>
    ...
</t:form>

I checked my encoding settings at several places:

1. HTML source:

    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

1. Tapestry settings (this should be the default anyway):

   tapestry.charset=UTF-8
   

2. Firefox says (Tools>Page Info: Encoding): UTF-8.

3. The underlying database (Oracle) also uses UTF-8:

   character_set_system    utf8
   

Then I examined the header of the POST request and two things caught my eye:

1. There is no content type specified in the header. I would expect something like this:

   Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
   

2. Spaces are encoded with + instead of %20.

I also tried the following:

@Component(parameters = {"clientValidation=false", "enctype='application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8'"})
private Form form;

and

@Component(parameters = {"clientValidation=false", "enctype='application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8'", "accept-charset='utf-8'"})
private Form form;

but both with no success (and I’m looking for a general solution not a workaround).

Interestingly this proposal works for some special chars (like ä, ö, ü, ß and so on), but I do not want to use ISO-8859-1. How can I set the encoding Tapestry uses for forms to UTF-8? What am I missing or is there a completely different reason for my problem?

EDIT: I made a test without the database and the problem remains, so it’s not about a wrong encoding setting on the db-side.

Answer 1

It was indeed a misconfiguration of my server. The following addition to my web.xml solved it (of course this should also work with a non-Spring filter).

<filter>
    <filter-name>charsetFilter</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>
</filter>

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>charsetFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>