Is UTF-8 used everywhere for Tomcat 8.5.6?

[R]

Hi,

I have a default installation of Tomcat 8.5.6. When I make a POST request
with a tilde character, and the encoding is set to UTF-8, it seems that my
servlet handler is decoding it incorrectly. I have to set the character
encoding on the HttpServletRequest parameter to decode properly, example:

  protected void doPost(HttpServletRequest request, ...) {
      // I have to set this manually.
      request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");

      // Decoding works now.
      String test = request.getParam("test");
      ...
  }

Reading the Tomcat docs, it seems like everything should be UTF-8 by
default. Is there a setting we still have to apply to get UTF-8 to be the
default encoding?

Thanks