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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T03:56:35+00:00

I have a webapp on which I need to display unicode characters. It’s all

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I have a webapp on which I need to display unicode characters. It’s all fine when I write the strings in the jsp, for example:

<%@ page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8" %>
<%@ page import="com.xyz.foo.ConsoleApp" %>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="UTF-8"/>
    </head>
    <body><%= "Setúbal" %></body>
</html>

I get the desired output: Setúbal

However, the equivalent code in a servlet does not render properly, for example:

public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException, ServletException {
    response.setContentType("text/html;charset=UTF-8");
    PrintWriter writer = response.getWriter();

    writer.println("<html>");
    writer.println("<head><meta charset='UTF-8'/></head>");
    writer.println("<body>Setúbal</body>");
    writer.println("</html>");
}

The same thing happens when in the jsp I load the text from a class: 

<%@ page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8" %>
<%@ page import="com.xyz.foo.ConsoleApp" %>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="UTF-8"/>
    </head>
    <body><%= ConsoleApp.getText() %></body>
</html>

In both cases I get strange characters: Set√∫bal

All files are UTF-8 and the response headers have the following:

Content-Type    text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Encoding    gzip
Date    Tue, 09 Nov 2010 09:44:05 GMT
Server  Google Frontend
Cache-Control   private, x-gzip-ok=""
Content-Length  438
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use the javac -encoding parameter to tell javac what encoding your java source is stored in, otherwise it uses the platform default which apparently isn’t UTF-8.

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