After just spending a good amount of time troubleshooting an issue with character encoding in JSF + JBoss AS7 I thought I would throw up a few notes on the subject as there are lots of scattered bits floating around but no real clear explanation. Hopefully this does more than contribute to the scattered bits :-)
First lets start off with a little background on how servers and clients determine how to encode data for transfer
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Server response to Client:
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Server Encode: When a server is sending a response to a client with JSF it encodes the response based on the defined encoding of the file which is usually set at the top of a JSF XHTML file <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> The server will also include a Content-Type in the response header sent to the client.
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Client Decode: When the client receives a response it checks the Content-Type defined in the response headers to decide which charset to use for decode. However If the Content-Type is not listed in the response header then the client may check the page meta tags for a hint or default to ISO-8955-1
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Client Request (POST) to Server:
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Client Encode: The client will encode it’s request based on the encoding of the response it received from the server.
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Server Decode: This is where things get a little tricky.
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The request received from the client will likely lack any hint as to how things were encoded.
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It may have a Accept-Charset defined, but that is simply informing the server which charset’s are valid for it’s response encoding.
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It will also have a Content-Type which reflects the enctype set on the form element submitting this post. By default it is application/x-www-form-urlencoded. Notice no reference to the charset this request was encoded in.
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Some requests like ajax requests will look like this application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=utf-8; This does work and Tomcat/JbossWeb will decode as utf-8 but I have not figured out how to force this on a non-ajax h:form
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The catch here is that if there is not a charset defined in the request Content-Type then the request parameters will be decoded using ISO-8859-1.
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So you’ve configured for pages for UTF-8 and ensured that your server responses are including a charset in the Content-Type. Everything is great until you submit the form and your UTF-8 encoded client request is decoded as ISO-8859-1. Depending on the data your users submit you may not even notice this in your app for weeks/months/years/never. But for example if user may submit something like I’m and you will get I’m
Once you accept that this is how things work, there is an easy way to fix this by adding the following snippet to your web.xml
<web-app>
...
<filter>
<filter-name>forceUTF8CharSet</filter-name>
<filter-class>org.apache.catalina.filters.SetCharacterEncodingFilter</filter-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>encoding</param-name>
<param-value>utf-8</param-value>
</init-param>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>forceUTF8CharSet</filter-name>
<url-pattern>*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
...
</web-app>This filter currently is in Tomcat 7.0.20 and up. If you are running JBoss 7 you can just grab the class from Github import it into your project. I’ve opened JBWEB-225 with JBoss Web to have this filter added.
