How to configure UTF-8 on Velocity?

Question

Using Java, Servlets, MySQL, Tomcat and Velocity, the following steps were taken:

velocity.properties :
- input.encoding=UTF-8
- output.encoding=UTF-8
server.xml
- URIEncoding = UTF-8
<html><head> Charset
- meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;CHARSET=UTF-8"
eclipse properties, project properties, file & editor encoding
- set all that apply to UTF-8
JDBC connection:
- db.url=jdbc:mysql://:/?useEncoding=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8
java/servlet code:
- request.setCharacterEncoding( UTF-8 )

All of the above didn't work. Until the following code was done:

private String getParameter(String key) {
    String param = request.getParameter(key);
        if (Util.isNotEmpty(param)) {
            try {
                return new String(param.getBytes("8859_1"), "utf-8");
            } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
            return param;
        }
    return null;
}

The above means that request.setCharacterEncoding didn't have an effect ( getCharacterEncoding() does return UTF-8 ); knowing that the request wrapper is wrapped in a ThreadLocal object.

How is this caused and how can I solve it?

The symptoms indicate that you (or Velocity) didn't set the charset attribute in the HTTP response Content-Type header. Note that the <meta> tag is ignored when the page is served over HTTP. Instead, the charset attribute of the HTTP response Content-Type header will be used, if any. The <meta> tag is only used when the user saves the webpage to its local disk and then views it later from the disk on by file:///. Your problem needs likely to be solved in the Velocity side. — BalusC
OK, so I extended VelocityLayoutServlet just to do set the response character encoding, and printed the header to get "Content-Type:text/html;charset=UTF-8". As I mentioned in the original post (before Admin's edit), this problem occurs from client to server and not the other way, that is when saving form data, hence, the positive effect of the function defined above. Thanks — k.honsali

ivy ivy · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-20T07:12:43

To interpret parameters correctly, the URL needs to be parsed as UTF-8 by tomcat. Set this in the server.xml connector properties, e.g. with:

<Connector port="8080"
               maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
               enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="100"
               debug="0" connectionTimeout="20000" 
               disableUploadTimeout="true" 
               URIEncoding="UTF-8"/>

How to configure UTF-8 on Velocity?

2 Answers