Unable to change charset from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 in glassfish 3.1

Question

I am having problems to change the charset in my web application response from ISO-8859-1 (default) to UTF-8. I already added the VM option -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

Answer 1

In order to define a standard response charset other than the default ISO-8859-1 for GlassFish (or Tomcat, or any other Servlet container) you will need to put a filter that calls response.setCharacterEncoding. Here is how:
1. In your web.xml define the filter:

  Set Response Character Encoding
  com.omrispector.util.SetCharacterEncodingFilter
  
    encoding
    UTF-8
  



  Set Response Character Encoding
  /*

2. Here is the filter implementation:

package com.omrispector.util;

import javax.servlet.*;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.nio.charset.Charset;
import java.util.logging.Logger;

/**
 * Created by Omri at 03/12/13 10:39
 * Sets the character encoding to be used for all sources returned
 * (Unless they override it later)
 * This is free for use - no license whatsoever.
 */
public class SetCharacterEncodingFilter implements Filter {

  private String encoding = null;
  private boolean active = false;

  private static final Logger logger =
      Logger.getLogger(SetCharacterEncodingFilter.class.getName());

  /**
   * Take this filter out of service.
   */
  @Override
  public void destroy() {
    this.encoding = null;
  }

  /**
   * Select and set (if specified) the character encoding to be used to
   * interpret request parameters for this request.
   */
  @Override
  public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response,
                       FilterChain chain)
      throws IOException, ServletException {
    if (active) response.setCharacterEncoding(encoding);
    chain.doFilter(request, response);
  }

  /**
   * Place this filter into service.
   */
  @Override
  public void init(FilterConfig filterConfig) throws ServletException {
    this.encoding = filterConfig.getInitParameter("encoding");
    try {
      Charset testCS = Charset.forName(this.encoding);
      this.active = true;
    } catch (Exception e) {
      this.active = false;
      logger.warning(encoding + " character set not supported ("+e.getMessage()+"). SetCharacterEncodingFilter de-activated.");
    }
  }
}