How to use UTF-8 with tomcat

Question

Tomcat does not encode correctly String literals that contain unicode characters. The problem occurs at a Linux server but not on my development machine (Windows). It affects ONLY String literals (not Strings read from DB or from file!!!).

• I have set the URIEncoding="utf-8" at the Connector tag (server.xml).
• I have used setCharacterEncoding().
• I cheched the stack trace (no filters that might set encoding).
• I have set the LANG environment variable
• I cheched the HTTP Headers and they are correct (Content-Type=text/plain;charset=utf-8)
• I checked the encoding at the browser and it is correct (UTF-8)

Nothing of the above works. Any ideas on what I might be missing?

public class Test extends HttpServlet {

@Override
protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) throws ServletException, IOException {

    resp.setCharacterEncoding("utf-8");
    resp.setContentType("text/plain;");

    Writer w = resp.getWriter();
    w.write("Μαλακία Latin"); //Some unicode characters
    w.close();
}

The above shows this at the browser. Îλληνικά Latin

Solution 1

You can force the encoding of files when javac reads them by passing in -encoding 'utf-8' or -encoding 'iso-8859-1' when compiling. Just make sure that it matches whatever encoding your .java files are actually encoded as.

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/tools/windows/javac.html

-encoding encoding Set the source file encoding name, such as EUC-JP and UTF-8. If -encoding is not specified, the platform default converter is used.

Solution 2

Try setting the file.encoding system property e.g. -Dfile.encoding=utf-8 on the Linux JVM command line