CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javastringjspencodingcharacter-encoding
m_a_khan
m_a_khan

Reputation: 1571

Java String Encoding to UTF-8

I have some HTML code that I store in a Java.lang.String variable. I write that variable to a file and set the encoding to UTF-8 when writing the contents of the string variable to the file on the filesystem. I open up that file and everything looks great e.g. → shows up as a right arrow.

However, if the same String (containing the same content) is used by a jsp page to render content in a browser, characters such as → show up as a question mark (?)

When storing content in the String variable, I make sure that I use: 

String myStr = new String(bytes[], charset)

instead of just: 

String myStr = "<html><head/><body>&rarr;</body></html>";

Can someone please tell me why the String content gets written to the filesystem perfectly but does not render in the jsp/browser?

Thanks.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 10135

Answers (3)

Kennet
Kennet

Reputation: 5796

The lazy developer (=me) uses Apache Common Lang StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml http://commons.apache.org/lang/api-release/org/apache/commons/lang/StringEscapeUtils.html#escapeHtml(java.lang.String) which will help you handle all 'odd' characters. Let the browser do the final translation of the html entities.

Upvotes: 0

BalusC
BalusC

Reputation: 1109635

but does not render in the jsp/browser?

You need to set the response encoding as well. In a JSP you can do this using

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

This has actually the same effect as setting the following meta tag in HTML <head>:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

Upvotes: 4

Dylan Lacey
Dylan Lacey

Reputation: 1844

Possibilities:

  1. The browser does not support UTF-8
  2. You don't have Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 in your HTTP Headers.

Upvotes: 1

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