eclipse vs tomcat deployment - exported war (partially) fails while the project runs in eclipse

Question

I have a webapp in eclipse juno - when I hit Run on server runs fine - either inside eclipse\'s browser (I am on windows) or in FF.

Right click > ex

Answer 1

One thing that helped was to add to the web-xml :

<jsp-config>
    <taglib>
        <taglib-uri>
            functions
        </taglib-uri>
        <taglib-location>
            functions.tld
        </taglib-location>
    </taglib>
</jsp-config>

Now tomcat (7.0.30) sees my taglib which is used to encode URIs.

---

Strange thing : when I print the username with system out I get ???? in tomcat's console instead of hieroglyphs. Maybe this points to the issue ? In my controller I have :

final String username = Helpers.decodeRequest(request
                .getParameter("user"));
System.out.println("ProfileController.doGet() user name DECODED : "
                                + username);

where :

private static final String CHARSET_FOR_URL_ENCODING = "UTF-8";

public static String decodeRequest(String parameter)
        throws UnsupportedEncodingException {
    System.out.println(Charset.defaultCharset()); // EDIT: suggested by @Esailija
    if (parameter == null)
        return null;
    System.out.println("decode - request.getBytes(\"iso-8859-1\"):"
            + new String(parameter.getBytes("iso-8859-1")));
    System.out.println("decode - request.getBytes(\"iso-8859-1\") BYTES:"
            + parameter.getBytes("iso-8859-1"));
    for (byte iterable_element : parameter.getBytes("iso-8859-1")) {
        System.out.println(iterable_element);
    }
    System.out.println("decode - request.getBytes(\"UTF-8\"):"
            + new String(parameter.getBytes(CHARSET_FOR_URL_ENCODING))); // UTF-8
    return URLDecoder.decode(new String(parameter.getBytes("iso-8859-1")),
            CHARSET_FOR_URL_ENCODING);
}

So tomcat :

windows-1252 // EDIT: suggested by @Esailija
decode - request.getBytes("iso-8859-1"):╬╡╬╗╬╗╬╖╬╜╬▒╧?╬▒
decode - request.getBytes("iso-8859-1") BYTES:[B@d171825
-50
-75
-50
-69
-50
-69
-50
-73
-50
-67
-50
-79
-49
-127
-50
-79
decode - request.getBytes("UTF-8"):├Ä┬╡├Ä┬╗├Ä┬╗├Ä┬╖├Ä┬╜├Ä┬▒├?┬?├Ä┬▒
ProfileController.doGet() user name DECODED : ╬╡╬╗╬╗╬╖╬╜╬▒╧?╬▒
???????? // user Dao System.out.println("ελληναρα");
com.mysql.jdbc.JDBC4PreparedStatement@67322bd9: SELECT * FROM users WHERE username='╬╡╬╗╬╗╬╖╬╜╬▒╧?╬▒'
ProfileController.doGet() user : null

Eclipse :

UTF-8 // EDIT: suggested by @Esailija
decode - request.getBytes("iso-8859-1"):ελληναρα
decode - request.getBytes("iso-8859-1") BYTES:[B@44c353ae
-50
-75
-50
-69
-50
-69
-50
-73
-50
-67
-50
-79
-49
-127
-50
-79
decode - request.getBytes("UTF-8"):ελληναÏα
ProfileController.doGet() user name DECODED : ελληναρα
ελληναρα // user Dao System.out.println("ελληναρα");
com.mysql.jdbc.JDBC4PreparedStatement@73aae7c6: SELECT * FROM users WHERE username='ελληναρα'
ProfileController.doGet() user : com.ted.domain.User@4b22015d

EDIT : if I change the eclipse encoding in prefs > workspace > text file encoding and set the default (Cp1252)

windows-1252
decode - request.getBytes("iso-8859-1"):λαλακης
decode - request.getBytes("iso-8859-1") BYTES:[B@5ef1946a
-50
// same bytes ....
decode - request.getBytes("UTF-8"):λαλακη�‚
ProfileController.doGet() user name DECODED : λαλακης
ελληναÏ?α
com.mysql.jdbc.JDBC4PreparedStatement@4646ebd8: SELECT * FROM users WHERE username='λαλακης'
ProfileController.doGet() user : null

and Eclipse also fails

---

NB : Tomcat does print the correct url in the address bar

Eclipse is fine :

Notice that Firefox automatically decodes the Url (to my bewilderment)

Answer 2

For decoding URIs correctly, you need URIEncoding connector attribute in Tomcat:

<connector ... URIEncoding="UTF-8" ... />

See my rant https://stackoverflow.com/a/15587140/995876

So it doesn't come with normal code, you need it in the application server configuration separately or use an application server that defaults to UTF-8. There is no way to affect this from code unfortunately.

Drop the decodeRequest and never use new String/getBytes without explicit encoding argument.

---

Alternative.

If you can't edit the server connector configuration, you can fix your code by providing the encoding explicitly to new String:

public static String decodeRequest(String parameter) {
     return new String(parameter.getBytes("iso-8859-1"), "UTF-8");
}