Charset encoding problems with JSP, JQuery and Javascript

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18474186

Question

I'm experiencing some problems with charset encoding in my web-based application. Despite I've properly configured page encoding, special chars continue being shown truncated.

I'm using JQuery Easy UI plugins to do a great part of the job, but the problem also occours in simple jQuery/Javascript codes, as alert boxes, for example.

JSP Page Header:

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c"%>
<%@ taglib prefix="fmt" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/fmt" %>
<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=utf-8"
    pageEncoding="utf-8"%> <!-- "ISO-8859-1" -->
<html>
 <head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
(...)

jQuery code:

$.fn.altStatusTarefa = 
function (idStat, idTar){
    var motivo =prompt("Informe o motivo da alteração:",
            "(Descrição suscinta)");
    if (motivo!=null && motivo!="")
      {
            var result = $.post("TarefaUpdateStatus", {
                                    idTarefa : idTar, 
                                    idStatus : idStat,
                                    motivoAlt : motivo 
                                } 
                            );
                result.done(function( data ) {
                     $.messager.show({
                        title:'Sucesso',
                        msg:'A alteração foi processada. ' +
                            'Tecle F5 para atualizar o formulário.',
                        showType:'show'
                        });
                });
                result.fail(function(jqXHR, textStatus) {
                    $.messager.alert('Erro',
                            'Houve um problema na atualização: ' + 
                            textStatus,'error');
                 });
                result.always({
                });
        }
    else{
            alert("Alteração cancelada.");
        }
     };

All these special characters (ã, ç, é, etc.) are truncated during runtime.

Any idea on what could be happening or what's the solution? Thanks!

Was it helpful?

Solution

After a saga on search for the response, I've manage to achive a solution.

First of all, my problems was solved through three steps in order to achieve the correct parsing of the entyre application:

  1. Convert all .js files in Eclipse to UTF-8 charset (is not the default). In Eclipse, right click .js file - properties - Resource - Charset encoding area - choose UTF-8; After that, all special characters in the file should be truncated. They must be replaced for new ones (probably there's an automatic conversion available somewhere, feel free to research); It solved the problem of Mojibakes characters in every external javascript code, like "alerts" (scripts in JSP pages were doing well).

  2. All responses using response.getWritter().write("...") should be encoded using response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8"); You may also use a filter as @BalusC wrote in the other answer. It solved problems on messagings through jQuery Easy UI Messager plugins, for example.

  3. Data retrieved from DB (make sure your DB is using UTF-8 too!) fulfilling jQuery Easy UI DataGrid plugin was being encoded through JSON (Gson) by a Spring-managed Controller. In this case, you should use the statement produces={"application/json; charset=UTF-8"} in @RequestMapping Spring annotation, as described by Jensen in this question.

Note that I've not talked in this answer about data-insertion, the opposite data-flow, just because it was not affecting my system (it was already well configured). But you may find usefull to know that there's some features on jQuery Easy UI to do so, as request settings too.

I wrote almost a tutorial because this very anoyng issue was upseting me for two days, and I really hope to help someone else (specially those who are dealing with non-english languages) to be not bored with this stuff. Greetings to @BalusC for his valuable help.

edit: in time, this post is useful on charset encodings.

OTHER TIPS

In the servlet behind the URL TarefaUpdateStatus, perform the following call before you grab the very first request parameter:

request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");

Better yet, do the job in a servlet filter which is mapped on an URL pattern of /*, so that you don't need to copypaste this line over all servlets. If you happen to use Spring, it has such one filter in its library.

This line will tell the servletcontainer to use UTF-8 to decode the URL-encoded POST request parameters. Otherwise it will use container's default charset for this which is usually ISO-8859-1, which would only cause those parameter values to end up in Mojibake.

Note that this does not cover GET request parameters. This needs to be configured in servletcontainer's side.

See also:

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