Re: Struts and encoding ISO-8859-1

[Jeroen De Ridder]

Well, ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 differ in the fact that ISO-8859-1 is a 
single-byte encoding and can only encode 256 characters (albeit 
carefully chosen), while UTF-8 is a multi-byte encoding and can 
represent any character in the Unicode codespace (ie. any character you 
can think of). Both will use a single byte for code points 0-127; once 
you go past that, UTF-8 will start using two bytes, but ISO-8859-1 will 
run out after 256 characters. So unless you're absolutely paranoid about 
saving a few bytes of network traffic, UTF-8 is the way to go. If you're 
encoding text in the Latin-1 range, most of your characters are likely 
to be regular ASCII characters anyway (as well as all the HTML markup 
the user doesn't get to see). That, and you'll get the additional 
benefit of being able to handle anything your users throw at you which 
is, needless to say, a big plus on the interwebs.

Hello,


Thank you for you quick reply.



Sorry if I was a bit unclear: I am posting via a form, in a JSP page, some
information that at a later stage is stored in my DB. When I use åäöÅÄÖ it is 
messed up to ??????-signs when
extracting it on the server side before trying to save it in the db.

I didn't try to use ISO-8859-1 at first, but when UTF-8 didn't work I changed. I assume that why it didn't work was because of the bug and the configurations you mentioned below (server.xml config). I'll try tomorrow. 

What is the purpose of using ISO-8859-1 when it seems like UTF-8 works for all languages then? Or am I mistaken there? I have myself in the past (way back) used Big5 and Gb1251 (think it was) coding Chinese applications using Java. 


Don't know what happened to my e-mail I sent out, it's totally
corrupted I can see now, a lot of information is missing (at least in
my web-client...). But I think your answer helps me so I skip completing
that missing information now.

Thanks again!

Regards,
Niklas


----------------------------------------
  
Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2009 21:52:23 +0200
From: voetsjo...@gmail.com
To: user@struts.apache.org
Subject: Re: Struts and encoding ISO-8859-1

What exactly is giving you trouble? Are your HTTP parameters not
properly received? Does your DB data get garbled when you output it?
I've recently had problems with ISO-8859-1 and Struts 2 as well, and
there are some things you need to be aware of.

It turns out that by default Tomcat uses ISO-8859-1 exclusively for
decoding URI parameters, but only for the URI parameters. This can lead
to bizarre situations such as POST request parameters getting received
perfectly in UTF-8, but GET request parameters getting garbled into
ISO-8859-1. Now, the filter you wrote makes sense and I have found many
similar solutions when researching this issue myself, and Struts 2
actually already does this for you (check out the Dispatcher.prepare
method). The problem, however, is that setCharacterEncoding does not
affect the decoding of the URI parameters; at least not when your Tomcat
instance in Eclipse is set to its default configuration.

The solution is to either explicitly tell Tomcat which URI encoding to
use, or to tell it to use the same encoding as the request body. This
last option makes it so that it will use the encoding set by
setCharacterEncoding for decoding the URI (which is what you'll want).
You can do this by editing your tomcat's server.xml and adding the
attribute useBodyEncodingForURI="true" to your HTTP/1.1 Connector entry.
It would look like this:


redirectPort="8443" useBodyEncodingForURI="true" />

Also, don't forget to manually publish to Tomcat for these changes to
take effect; for some reason it doesn't seem to pick up on the changes
unless you manually publish to Tomcat (or maybe I'm just impatient).

You're not out of the woods yet, however. There is also a bug in Struts
2.1.6's filters (eg. StrutsPrepareAndExecuteFilter) which causes the
call to setCharacterEncoding to be performed after the request map and
all the parameters have already been read, so that the call to
setCharacterEncoding become pretty much useless (see
https://issues.apache.org/struts/browse/WW-3075). This issue has been
fixed in Struts 2.1.7, so you can either stick with your current extra
Filter (which should also work fine, provided that useBodyEncodingForURI
is activated and that it comes before the struts filter) or go with a
2.1.7 snapshot. From what I can tell from the dev mailing list it's
pretty close to release, so you shouldn't have too many issues with it.
It uses xwork 2.1.3 as well, which was released recently and fixes at
least one important localization issue
(https://issues.apache.org/struts/browse/WW-2176), which might actually
very well be related to your problem.

Finally, make sure to set a charset in your HTTP Content-type response
header, like so:

Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1.

If you're using JSPs, for example, this is done using the page directive:



You can also set the same in a  directive if you want, but all
modern browsers use the value from the response header rather than the
 tag. More importantly, they will also send form data in the same
encoding used by the page the data is sent from. In short, if you send a
page with a form in it as ISO-8859-1 and the user submits the form,
their browser will send you the data as ISO-8859-1.

Having said all the above, I don't see a reason to go with ISO-8859-1
over UTF-8. Either way, I hope this helps you solve your issue. FYI, I
have UTF-8 fully working here using xwork 2.1.3 and a struts 2.1.7
snapshot. Should you decide to switch to UTF-8, I'll be happy to answer
your questions.

Cheers,
Jeroen
    
Hello,

Using Struts 2.1.6
Tomcat 6
Java 1.6
Eclipse Ganymede

I am trying to get my first Struts2 application working. Everything works fine 
except the encoding part. Swede as I am I want to use åäöÅÄÖ, i.e. ISO-8859-1, 
but it doesn't work.

I have searched the net and tried various things, but I think this is pointing 
in the correct direction so I did as explained (but that person used UTF-8 
instead):

I created following file:

public class EncodingFilter implements Filter{

private String encoding = "ISO-8859-1";

@Override
public void destroy() {

}

@Override
public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response,
FilterChain filterChain) throws IOException, ServletException {

request.setCharacterEncoding(encoding);
response.setCharacterEncoding(encoding);
filterChain.doFilter(request, response);
}

@Override
public void init(FilterConfig filterConfig) throws ServletException {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
String encodingParam = filterConfig.getInitParameter("encoding");
if (encodingParam != null) {
encoding = encodingParam;
}


}
}

My JSP files has this



and this



I added following part to web.xml


EncodingFilter
org.nicsoft.utilities.EncodingFilter

encoding
ISO-8859-1



EncodingFilter
/*


I assume I don't have to do anything else in order to get it working with 
doFiler, the application server automatically request the doFilter, correct?

I am also using Hibernate for storing data that I post from the form in MySQL. 
However, I am quite sure that Hiberante has nothing to do with the problem 
because I am doing I am writing the parameters to the console before Hibernate 
hooks in.

Can anyone help out, I have no idea how to proceed. I couldn't find any good 
how-to for this problem or posts on any forum. The best was the one I explained 
above.

Thank you in advance!

Best Regards,
Niklas

_________________________________________________________________
More than messages–check out the rest of the Windows Live™.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowslive/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: user-unsubscr...@struts.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: user-h...@struts.apache.org


      
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: user-unsubscr...@struts.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: user-h...@struts.apache.org

    

_________________________________________________________________
Invite your mail contacts to join your friends list with Windows Live Spaces. 
It's easy!
http://spaces.live.com/spacesapi.aspx?wx_action=create&wx_url=/friends.aspx&mkt=en-us
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: user-unsubscr...@struts.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: user-h...@struts.apache.org