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: 21 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
Tom Harrison

Thanks for this post. In my case, I also had to set response.setCharacterEncoding(”UTF-8″); to get everything to work. Adding the filter class and the directives in web.xml is simple.

Link | November 25th, 2008 at 9:19 am
Do Van Vung

Thanks alot, it save alot of time for my me

Link | December 26th, 2008 at 4:17 am
leeo

??:)
??, ???????????request.setCharacterEncoding(”UTF8″);

??Filter,???..?????. ??LZ.

Link | January 3rd, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Fiona

In my case I have to show Japanese character on the page and to be saved into database. I’ve tried with filter but it doesn’t work out although it’s going to filter class but the charachter are still in ?? format. Could someone help me? Thanks in advance.

Link | May 14th, 2009 at 3:25 am