Ian Purton’s Notes

Struts, UTF-8 and form submissions

PublishedFebruary 23rd, 2006
Authorian.purton
CategoriesJava

Struts will convert data that is received from form submissions to a default encoding because most browsers don’t set the content type.

To stop struts mangling the data you need to set the content type with a filter before it gets as far as the struts layer.

Use the filter below

package filters;

import java.io.IOException;
import javax.servlet.*;

public class UTF8Filter implements Filter
{
	public void destroy() {}

	public void doFilter(ServletRequest request,
		ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain)
		throws IOException, ServletException
	{
		request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF8");
		chain.doFilter(request, response);
	}

	public void init(FilterConfig filterConfig)
		throws ServletException
	{
	}
}

You’ll need to add these settings to your web.xml

<filter>
	<filter-name>UTF8Filter</filter-name>
	<filter-class>filters.UTF8Filter</filter-class>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
	<filter-name>UTF8Filter</filter-name>
	<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

Be careful how you view the output of any form submissions, for instance the console on eclipse is not UTF-8 by default.

"Struts, UTF-8 and form submissions" was published on February 23rd, 2006 and is listed in Java.

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Struts, UTF-8 and form submissions: 17 Comments

Anonymous

Thanks for the tip!!! I was searching everywhere on the net and changing character encodings everywhere in the code but could not resolve the problem. Thanks for helping me with my problem.

Link | April 27th, 2006 at 8:19 pm
Anonymous

Thank you very much!
Your tip really saved my day!
All the best,
Armin

Link | July 27th, 2006 at 4:31 am
Anonymous

Great tip…
Keep up the good work…and thanks for saving me many hours of research..

Lance

Link | August 2nd, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Anonymous

thanks a lot for code..
I tried it for a long time
Once again thank u .

Link | September 29th, 2006 at 10:29 am
Ed

Also think it’s a brilliant tip - i spent ages trying to sort this out before i found this… couldn’t have done it without you!!!

thanks!

Link | October 21st, 2006 at 4:32 pm
Derek

Thanks!!!!!!!!.

Link | December 20th, 2006 at 7:58 am
Rajesh

Shouldnt the necoding be UTF-8 instead of UTF8.

From : request.setCharacterEncoding(”UTF8″);
To: request.setCharacterEncoding(”UT-F8″);

Link | February 15th, 2007 at 11:37 am
Rajesh

Sorry it should be :

From : request.setCharacterEncoding(â€UTF8â€³);
To: request.setCharacterEncoding(â€UTF-8â€³);

Link | February 15th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Roberto

For who it is in the development of the first project and finds a solution so practical. It is very good. Easy to implement, fantastic. Congratulations. Thank you.

Link | April 11th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
jy

I know this solution and have ever improved it on one of my applications.
But on another application, I have used the same solution but it doesn’t work :
my filter is the first declared in my web.xml, but the code line : request.setCharacterEncoding(â€ISO-8859-15â€³); seems to not work.
any idea to help me ?

Link | July 18th, 2007 at 11:40 am
delirii

Your tip only works if coupled with a Tomcat connectors modification :
I was obliged to add these attributes in order to get full (and effective) UTF-8 encoding :

URIEncoding=”UTF-8″ useBodyEncodingForURI=”true”

NOTE : it may help jy …

Link | November 21st, 2007 at 4:33 am
Rahul

Hi
I do not know where to put or set Filter file in my ocde .. please provide me the detail of that.

Link | December 18th, 2007 at 1:25 am
Tom

I can only subscribe to the postings made above. Brilliant solution! Thank you

Link | January 9th, 2008 at 4:58 am
Gugga

Thanks yaar !!!
The solution given is very simple and efficient

Link | January 25th, 2008 at 1:18 am
Eugen G.

Thanks so much!!!
Brilliant solution!!!

Link | February 12th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Hotblack

Thank you very much!
Clear and Simple — And worked right away!

Link | September 7th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Mohammad

Thanks a lot for this help. I spent two weeks looking for a solution.

Link | November 3rd, 2008 at 9:10 am