I'm messing around with character sets and character set conversions, and
have a problem getting it to work in servlets. Installing an additional
Charset requires entries in the file java.nio.charset.spi.CharsetProvider
in META-INF/services. My problem is in understanding exactly WHAT META-INF
directory I should place this file in...
So far, the only way I've been able to get things to work properly, is to
unpack the $CATALINA_HOME/bin/bootstrap.jar, add my Charset,
CharsetProvider, CharsetEncoder and CharsetDecoder classes to it, change
the META-INF, and re-pack the bootstrap jar. However, this does seem a
rather "hacky" way to get things working...
Actually, I found that James Manger had exactly the same problem about a
year ago. I include his original posting, as it formulates the problem
rather well:
I would like to use a non-standard character set for selected operations
within a servlet. I have implemented a CharsetProvider, Charset,
CharsetEncoder & CharsetDecoder.
I can use my new character set from a Java application by listing the
CharsetProvider class name in the following file within the application JAR.
META-INF/services/java.nio.charset.spi.CharsetProvider
(see API for CharsetProvider)
My application (without any particular "import" statements) can make calls
such as:
String msg = "Hello, World!";
byte[] encoding = msg.getBytes("MY-CHARSET");
I cannot get these lines to work in a servlet -- the
msg.getBytes("MY-CHARSET") throws:
java.nio.charset.UnsupportedCharsetException: MY-CHARSET
QUESTION: How do I tell the system running my servlet about my character
set?
Adding a JAR with the character set (and META-INF... file) to the jre/ext/
directory makes the character set available to all Java apps - but not to
the servlet! Adding the JAR to tomcat/common/lib/ did not seem to work
either.
My servlet can see my CharsetProvider class, but my CharsetProvider is not
"registered" with the system (and it needs to be "registered" for
String.getBytes("MY-CHARSET") to work).
[JWSDP 1.0_01, J2SE 1.4.0_01, Tomcat 4.1.2, SunOS 5.6]
James Manger
Unlike James, I'm using J2SE 1.4.1_02-b06, Tomcat 4.1.18 and RedHat 8.0.
Happy for any clue anyone may be able to provide!
Cheers,
- Johan
---
Johan Krisár,
johan.krisar(at)depicta.com
