Grails not encoding the unicode characters properly

Question

In my grails app, the unicode characters are not being encoded properly.

I\'m using grails 1.3.7 and tomcat 7.0.22. Following are the settings that I\'ve configured

Answer 1

Setting the Dialect to UTF-8 is not going to work. You have to also modify the tables or the columns of your table to support UTF-8.

Here is the command to alter the table

ALTER TABLE tbl_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

or you can try to just modify the column in which you want to store utf-8

using the command

ALTER TABLE t MODIFY col1 CHAR(50) CHARACTER SET utf8;

Answer 2

If you are not using Mysql but the HSqlDB which is shipped as default, you will not see your encoding problems. The problems occurs due to Mysql, InnoDB and UTF-8.

Since you are using a Mysql Connection and already setting useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8 to the MySql connection URL

you still have to add a special hibernate dialect for InnoDB and UTF-8:

Datasource.groovy should contain:

environments {
    development {
        dataSource {         
            ......
            driverClassName = "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
            dialect = "com.domain.mysql.dialect.MySQLUTF8InnoDBDialect"
            .....

Create a new File in src/java/com/domain/mysql/dialect/MySQLUTF8InnoDBDialect.java

package com.domain.mysql.dialect;

import org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLInnoDBDialect;

/**
 * Sets the default charset to UTF-8.
 */
public class MySQLUTF8InnoDBDialect extends MySQLInnoDBDialect {

    @Override
    public String getTableTypeString() {
        return " ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8";
    }
}

Make sure your Config.groovy has:

grails.views.default.codec = "html"
grails.views.gsp.encoding = "UTF-8"
grails.converters.encoding = "UTF-8"

And your views/layouts/main.gsp starts with:

<%@ page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8" %>

Greets,

Jan