JSP encoding while inserting non-English text in MySQL database

Question

I am using Ajax call to insert Indian characters in MySQL database. I am facing an UTF-8 encoding problem in between flow of my application.

When I am inserting the

Answer 1

One aside: Place the directives together without spaces. (You can even combine the attributes inside a single @page.) Because HTTP headers should be set before HTML content is written. Because of page buffering this is not strictly needed, but formally yes.

The other answers till now are true.

One additional issue is the database, table and field definitions which all can have a default and actual character set.

Off course one should be really careful, મ��પ�ષ�ઠmight be a wrong display of the correct data, as the displaying program might not be using UTF-8.

Answer 2

Please help me to solve this issue...

You need to figure out where in the processing chain things are going on.

You say that you have created the tables correctly and that you can enter and display text from your terminal. You have something that is known to be handling these characters correctly, so try the following experiments ... in this order ... to isolate where things are going wrong.

1. Using the mysql command, attempt to insert a row containing the problem characters, and then to select and display the inserted row.

2. Write a simple Java program to do the same, using the JDBC URLs that your application is currently doing.

3. Modify your app to capture and log the request parameter strings it is receiving from the browser.

4. (If possible) capture the requests as received by your server and as sent by the browser. Check both the request parameters and the headers.

Answer 3

When I am inserting the non-English characters directly by JDBC (not using an Ajax call), then it's showing "????" in the database.

This will only happen when the both sides are perfectly aware of the character encoding differences in each side. Any character which is not covered by the character encoding used on the other side will be replaced by a question mark ?. Otherwise you would have seen Mojibake.

In this particular case, those sides are the Java side and the database side, with the JDBC driver as mediator. To fix this, you need to tell the JDBC driver what encoding those characters are in. You can do that by setting the useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8 parameters in the JDBC connection URL.

jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/dbname?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8

Then, depending on how you're sending the parameters from the client to server, you possibly also need to fix the request encoding. Given the fact that you're seeing Mojibake when you removes request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8"), you're using POST. So that part is fine.

For the case that, if you were using GET to send the parameters, you would need to configure URI encoding in the server side. It's unclear what server you're using, but in case of for example Tomcat, it's a matter of editing the <Connector> entry in /conf/server.xml as follows:

<Connector ... URIEncoding="UTF-8">

See also:

• Unicode - How to get the characters right?