€ symbol not defined

Question

I have a list in my action which I field by values saved on a MySql DB.

I only have one object stored, which has designation €.

In jsp when I do

Answer 1

If the page encoding is not defined, the default is (the equivalent of the JSP page directive):

<%@page contentType="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" %>

The encoding you want is not ISO-8859-1, but UTF-8, that supports any language (take a look at Table 23-2 Valid Values for the IANA-Defined Character Set).

You can set your page, request and response encoding in three ways:

1. Setting the contentType in each JSP:

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

2. Setting the pageEncoding in each JSP:

   <%@page pageEncoding="UTF-8" %>
   

3. Setting the <jsp-property-group> once in web.xml:

   <jsp-config>
       <jsp-property-group>
           <url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern>
           <page-encoding>UTF-8</page-encoding>            
       </jsp-property-group>
   </jsp-config>
   

The HTML <meta> tag will be generated accordingly. Remember to not specify different encodings when unnecessarily using both pageEncoding and <jsp-property-group>, it is a translation-time error.

For more info about this, read the Oracle docs (pretty old, but still true).

Answer 2

Place this on the top of the JSP page. Symbols in UTF-8 encoding displays better than ?.

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