How does URIEncoding = 'UTF-8' work?

Question

When I view the tomcat source code at http://grepcode.com/file/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org.apache.tomcat/tomcat-catalina/7.0.0/org/apache/catalina/connector/Request.java#Request.parseParameters%28%29 I can't find where to set encoding for the queryString which comes from get method and how does the configuration URIEncoding="UTF-8" in server.xml work in this method.

Answer 1

The URIEncoding parameter is what you're looking for. It sets the character encoding to be used when URI decoding the query string.

You use it in server.xml as an attribute of the Connector entity.

If successfully used it in the past.

Answer 2

First, let's use a more recent version of Tomcat. 7.0.0 is years old: Request.java from Tomcat 7.0.34

Second, the parseParameters method does not set the encoding: it fetches the encoding which has been set by other components. Some places where the content encoding might have been set:

1. The URIEncoding of the connector (defaults to ISO-8859-1 AS per HTTP RFC)
2. The request body encoding (from the HTTP request's Content-Type header)
3. Another component -- perhaps sniffing the encoding by looking at a parameter's value

If you just want to set the URI encoding to UTF-8 unconditionally across your site, then just use the URIEncoding attribute in your <Connector>.

The direct answer to your question is that server.xml's URIEncoding attribute does not work in this method: it works elsewhere.