Special and accented characters

Question

I am doing some work for a French client and so need to deal with accented characters. But I\'m running into a lot of difficulty, I am hoping the solution is simple and that

Answer 1

EDIT: I have found that string are malformed when simply displaying the the request parameter from a form. (ie, request.getParameter("string") already has malformed content).

This can have three causes:

1. It's a GET request and the server isn't configured to use UTF-8 to parse request URI. It's unclear which server you're using, so here's a Tomcat-targeted answer as example: set URIEncoding attribute of the HTTP Connector in /conf/server.xml to UTF-8.

2. If it's a POST request, then you need to ensure that the servletcontainer uses UTF-8 to encode the request body. You can do that by request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8") beforehand.

3. The console which you're writing the parameter to doesn't support UTF-8. It's unclear which console you're talking about, so here's an Eclipse-targeted answer as example: in Window > Preferences > General > Workspace > Text File Encoding set it to UTF-8.

See also:

• Unicode - How to get characters right? - Contains detailed answers to various problems.