I Have a Page where I search for a term and it is displaying perfect. Whatever character type it is.

Now when I have few checkboxes in JSP and I check it and submit. In these checkboxes I have one box name like ABC Farmacéutica Corporation.

When I click on submit button, I am calling a function and will set all parameters to a form and will submit that form. (I tested putting alert for the special character display before submit and it is displaying good).

Now, coming to the Java end, I use Springs Frame work. When I print the term in controller, then it is displayed like ABC Farmacéutica Corporation.

Please help... Thanks in advance.

EDIT :

Please try this sample Example

import java.*;
class sample{
    public static void main(String[] args){
        try{
            String aaa = "ABC Farmacéutica Corporation";
            String bbb = "ABC Farmacéutica Corporation";

            aaa = URLEncoder.encode(aaa, "UTF-8");
            bbb = URLDecoder.decode(bbb, "UTF-8");

            System.out.println("aaa   "+aaa);
            System.out.println("bbb   "+bbb);

        }catch(Exception e){
            System.out.println(e);      
        }
    }
}

I am getting output as,

aaa   PiSA+Farmac%C3%A9utica+Mexicana+Corporativo
bbb   PiSA Farmacéutica Mexicana Corporativo

Try to print the string aaa as it is.

I Have a Page where I search for a term and it is displaying perfect. Whatever character type it is.

Now when I have few checkboxes in JSP and I check it and submit. In these checkboxes I have one box name like ABC Farmacéutica Corporation.

When I click on submit button, I am calling a function and will set all parameters to a form and will submit that form. (I tested putting alert for the special character display before submit and it is displaying good).

Now, coming to the Java end, I use Springs Frame work. When I print the term in controller, then it is displayed like ABC Farmacéutica Corporation.

Please help... Thanks in advance.

EDIT :

Please try this sample Example

import java.net.*;
class sample{
    public static void main(String[] args){
        try{
            String aaa = "ABC Farmacéutica Corporation";
            String bbb = "ABC Farmacéutica Corporation";

            aaa = URLEncoder.encode(aaa, "UTF-8");
            bbb = URLDecoder.decode(bbb, "UTF-8");

            System.out.println("aaa   "+aaa);
            System.out.println("bbb   "+bbb);

        }catch(Exception e){
            System.out.println(e);      
        }
    }
}

I am getting output as,

aaa   PiSA+Farmac%C3%A9utica+Mexicana+Corporativo
bbb   PiSA Farmacéutica Mexicana Corporativo

Try to print the string aaa as it is.

• java
• javascript
• encoding

• What application server do you use? If Tomcat, try to set URIEncoding="UTF-8" in your Connector. – ninja Commented Jun 2, 2011 at 10:39
• what output do you get from the last edit? – Yanick Rochon Commented Jun 2, 2011 at 11:21
• At least let me know what format is é – Max Commented Jun 2, 2011 at 11:22
• Nice, I didn't know URLEncoders do perform a language translation as well... – Martijn Courteaux Commented Jun 2, 2011 at 11:27
• 1 @Max, it's UTF-8. Just like everyone says. Your Java files should be saved as UTF-8 format, send the page to have a content-type with UTF-8 encoding, etc. You see é because you are receiving an UTF-8 string in a non-utf-8 environment, somewhere. – Yanick Rochon Commented Jun 2, 2011 at 11:27

5 Answers 5

You get "ABC Farmacéutica Corporation" because the string you receive from the client is ISO-8859-1, you need to convert it into UTF-8 before you URL decode it. Like this :

bbb = URLDecoder.decode(new String(bbb.getBytes("ISO-8859-1"), "UTF-8"), "UTF-8");

NOTE : some encodings cannot be converted from and to different encodings without risking data loss. For example, you cannot convert Thaï characters (TIS-620) to another encoding, not even UTF-8. For this reason, avoid converting from one encoding to another, unless ultimately necessary (ie. the data comes from an external, third perty, or proprietary source, etc.) This is only a solution on how to convert from one source to another, knowing the source encoding.

This is an encoding problem, and the Ã clearly identify that this is UTF-8 text interpreted as ISO-Latin-1 (or one of its cousins).

Ensure that your JSP-page at the top show that it uses UTF-8 encoding.

I suspect the problem is with character encoding on the page. Make sure the page you submit from and the one you display to use the same character set and make sure that you set it explicitely. for instance if your server runs on Linux the default encoding will be UTF-8 but if you view the page on Windows it will assume (if no encoding is specified) it to be ISO-8859-1. Also when you are receiving the submitted text on your server side, the server will assume the default character set when building the string -- whereas your user might have used a differrent encoding if you didn't specify one.

As I understand it, the text is hardcoded in controller code like this:

    ModelAndView mav = new ModelAndView("hello");
    mav.addObject("message", "ABC Farmacéutica Corporation");
    return mav;

I expect this would work:

    ModelAndView mav = new ModelAndView("hello");
    mav.addObject("message", "ABC Farmac\u00e9utica Corporation");
    return mav;

If so, the problem is due to a mismatch between the character encoding your Java editor is using and the encoding your compiler uses to read the source code.

For example, if your editor saves the Java file as UTF-8 and you compile on a system where UTF-8 is not the default encoding, then you would need to tell your compiler to use that encoding:

javac -cp foo.jar -encoding UTF-8 Bar.java

Your build scripts and IDE settings need to be consistent when handling character data.

If your text editor saved your file as UTF-8 then, in a hex editor, é would be the byte sequence C3 A9; in many other encodings, it would have the value E9. ISO-8859-1 and windows-1252 would encode é as C3 A9. You can read about character encoding in Java source files here.

Change the encoding of jsp page to UTF-8 in the File> Properties then add this line in the head of your jsp page: <%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>