HTTP headers encoding/decoding in Java

Question

A custom HTTP header is being passed to a Servlet application for authentication purposes. The header value must be able to contain accents and other non-ASCII characters, s

Answer 1

Again: RFC 2047 is not implemented in practice. The next revision of HTTP/1.1 is going to remove any mention of it.

So, if you need to transport non-ASCII characters, the safest way is to encode them into a sequence of ASCII, such as the "Slug" header in the Atom Publishing Protocol.