In last few hours I’ve read a lot concerning this topic, and so far nothing has worked. I’m trying to return response containing “odd” some characters. Here is example of that, quite simple :
@ResponseBody
@RequestMapping(value="test")
public String test(){
String test = "čćžđš";
System.out.println(test);
logger.info(test);
return test;
}
This is my web.xml, because I found some answers where CharacterEncodingFilter helped(not in my case though). I used POST method because I read this applies to POST.
Also found this answer(related). Didn’t help as well.
When I debug it the correct value appears, but when I print it doesn’t as it can be seen below:

When I test it from jmeter, the response seems to be OK, Content-Type is text/html;charset=UTF-8
Here is a screenshot of that as well. http://i56.tinypic.com/14lt653.jpg
I think the right way is to return UTF-8, maybe I’m wrong.
After few days of this I just had “who’s your daddy moment”. It came from reading spring 3.0 reference, I had nothing else to try so why not go trough entire documentation.. and combination of @axtavt answer :
Who sets response content-type in Spring MVC (@ResponseBody)
Changed original solution :
To :
Darn spring!!! but still I’ll continue to use it.