I'm using a Struts 2 app with Tomcat 6 server using JDK 1.7. We support more than 15 languages. I've a form which sends an email, with 2 issues:
When I type any Japanese or Korean characters in the form and submit it, the email body contains all ????????
I have a captcha on the form page. If I enter an invalid captcha for Japanese or Korean and click submit, it comes back to the same page, retaining username, email, etc. However, the retained characters are corrupted and do not remain in the same language in which they're entered. However, this happens only for Japanese and Korean.
I have this line in my JSP at the very top of the page:
<%# page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"%>
Also, server.xml has a connector element which specifies URIEncoding="UTF-8"
These 2 issues are not present in other languages. Can any one tell me what am I missing?
Thanks!
The encoding problem seems to happen after you submit the form, in the code that prepares the email and sends it. Does your email program allow you to look at the raw data of the email? What's the (declared) encoding of the email? Can you have your email app choose an encoding? (And in which case make sure that UTF-8 is selected)?
Related
I receive a GET response to this web service
#GET
#Path("/nnnnnn")
public Response pfpfpfpf(#BeanParam NNNNNN n)
The class NNNNN has:
#QueryParam("parameter")
private String parameter;
And for that parameter there is a get and set.
I send a request on a get with a query parameter and it is being bind automatically to my option NNNNN, everything is great.
but, now i am sending Japanese strings in the query url. I encode the paramter by UTF-8 before sending, and I have to decode them using UTF-8.
but my question is where should I call the URLDecoder? i tried to call it in the getter of that parameter, but it didn't work, i kept having something like C3%98%C2%B4%C3%98%C2 instead of the Japanese characters
The solution that works for me is :
on the servlet, i should do this:
request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
and then on the html page i had to add this:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
This is a good question which has potential clear many doubts about how information is processed (encoded and decoded) between systems.
Before I proceed I must say have a fair understanding on Charset, Encoding etc. You may want to read this answer for a quick heads up.
This has to looked from 2 perspectives - browser and server.
Browser perspective of Encoding
Each browser will render the information/text, now to render the information/text it has to know how to interpret those bits/bytes so that it can render correctly (read my answer's 3rd bullet that how same bits can represent different characters in different encoding scheme).
Browser page encoding
Each browser will have a default encoding associated with it. Check this on how to see the default encoding of browser.
If you do not specify any encoding on your HTML page then default encoding of browser will take effect and will render the page as per those encoding rules. so, if default encoding is ASCII and you are using Japanese or Chinese or characters from Unicode supplementary plane then you will see garbage value.
You can tell browser that do not use your default encoding scheme but use this one to render by website, using <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">.
And this exactly what you did/found and you were fine because this meta tag essentially overrode the default encoding of browser.
Another way to achieve same effect is do not use this meta tag but just change the browser's default encoding and still you will be fine. But this is not recommended and using Content-Type meta tag in your JSP is recommended.
Try playing around with browser default encoding and meta tag using below simple HTML.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
の, は, でした <br></br>
昨夜, 最高
</body>
</html>
Server perspective of Encoding
Server should also know how to interpret the incoming stream of data, which basically means that which encoding scheme to use (server part is tricky because there are several possibilities). Read below from here
When data that has been entered into HTML forms is submitted, the form
field names and values are encoded and sent to the server in an HTTP
request message using method GET or POST, or, historically, via email.
The encoding used by default is based on a very early version of the
general URI percent-encoding rules, with a number of modifications
such as newline normalization and replacing spaces with "+" instead of
"%20". The MIME type of data encoded this way is
application/x-www-form-urlencoded, and it is currently defined (still
in a very outdated manner) in the HTML and XForms specifications. In
addition, the CGI specification contains rules for how web servers
decode data of this type and make it available to applications.
This again has 2 parts that how server should decode the incoming request stream and how it should encode the outgoing response stream.
There are several ways to do this depending upon the use case, for example:
There are methods like setCharacterEncoding, setContentType etc. in HTTP request and response object, which can be used to set the encoding.
This is exactly what you have done in your case that you have told the server that use UTF-8 encoding scheme for decoding the request data because I am expecting advanced Unicode supplementary plane characters. But this is not all, please do read more below.
Set the encoding at server or JVM level, using JVM attributes like -Dfile.encoding=utf8. Read this article on how to set the server encoding.
In your case you were fetching the Japanese characters from query string of the URL and query string is part of HTTP request object, so using request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8"); you were able to get the desired encoding result.
But same will not work for URL encoding, which is different from request encoding (your case). Consider below example, in both sysout you will not be able to see the desired encoding effect even after using request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8"); because here you want URL encoding since the URL will be something like http://localhost:7001/springapp/forms/executorTest/encodingTest/hellothere 昨夜, 最高 and in this URL there is no query string.
#RequestMapping(value="/encodingTest/{quertStringValue}", method=RequestMethod.GET)
public ModelAndView encodingTest(#PathVariable("quertStringValue") String quertStringValue, ModelMap model, HttpServletRequest request) throws UnsupportedEncodingException {
System.out.println("############### quertStringValue " + quertStringValue);
request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
System.out.println("############### quertStringValue " + quertStringValue);
return new ModelAndView("ThreadInfo", "ThreadInfo", "####### This is my encoded output " + quertStringValue);
}
Depending upon the framework you are using you may need additional configuration to specify a character encoding for requests or URLs so that you can either apply own encoding if the request does not already specify an encoding, or enforce the encoding in any case. This is useful because current browsers typically do not set a character encoding even if specified in the HTML page or form.
In Spring, there is org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter for configuring request encoding. Read this similar interesting question which is based on this fact.
In nut shell
Every computer program whether an application server, web server, browser, IDE etc. understands only bits, so it need to know how to interpret the bits to make expected sense out of it because depending upon encoding used, same bits can represent different characters. And that's where "Encoding" comes into picture by giving a unique identifier to represent a character so that all computer programs, diverse OS etc. knows exact right way to interpret it.
I'm just using:
NumberFormat cfLocal = NumberFormat.getCurrencyInstance(Locale.JAPAN.toString());
And it works fine on most devices/browsers/currencies except in IE and Yen I'm getting a few extra characters - could it be a weird encoding being sent, or browser specific settings screwing up handling of the ¥ symbol?
The output looks like this:
ï¿¥15,180
Would appreciate any leads or tips.
Edit:
I am outputting the values with JSP. JSP file is defined with this preamble:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<%# page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"
pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>
I'm no encoding expert but your XML appears to say one thing and your content-type another - try setting both to UTF-8.
If your data is coming from outside the application (e.g. a database, file, etc.), what is the encoding of the source? For example, a MySQL database may have a different character set specified.
If you are using a web server like Apache, is that changing the encoding? For example you can have a httpd.conf directive to set the default character set:
AddDefaultCharset utf-8
It would be worth checking the HTTP Headers in the browser to see what is actually being sent to the browser, and work back from there.
EDIT
Thinking about it more, I'm not sure if the XML encoding is necessarily the problem. It would probably be best to check the headers first, and compare it to the the html being produced.
I intend to build some translation-like web application where a user viewing a html page (which I had collected from the web and stored offline on the server side) and then the user will need to interact with the text inside this html, by selecting some subset of the characters (asking for translation-like operation)..
so the process here is divided to 3 parts:
- Extract the plain text from the html file
- The plain text will be pre-processed on the server and stored offline
- When the user selects a string online in the html, I need to identify the mapping in the plain text I had already extracted and stored offline.
For the plain-text-extraction I use jsoup.
and I had already pre-processed the plain files..
any ideas about the mapping part and identifying what text the user selected (or clicked)?
[Working on Java, Apache-Tomcat, JavaScript, linux ]
I am using PDFBox to create PDF from my web application. The web application is built in Java and uses JSF. It takes the content from a web based form and puts the contents into a PDF document.
Example: A user fill up an inputTextArea (JSF tag) in the form and that is converted to a PDF. I am unable to handle non-ASCII Characters.
How should I handle the non-ASCII characters or atleast strip them out before putting it on the PDF. Please help me with any suggestions or point me any resources. Thanks!
Since you're using JSF on JSP instead of Facelets (which is implicitly already using UTF-8), do the following steps to avoid the platform default charset being used (which is often ISO-8859-1, which is the wrong choice for handling of the majority of "non-ASCII" characters):
Add the following line to top of all JSPs:
<%# page pageEncoding="UTF-8" %>
This sets the response encoding to UTF-8 and sets the charset of the HTTP response content type header to UTF-8. The last will instruct the client (webbrowser) to display and submit the page with the form using UTF-8.
Create a Filter which does the following in doFilter() method:
request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
Map this on the FacesServlet like follows:
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>nameOfYourCharacterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
<servlet-name>nameOfYourFacesServlet</servlet-name>
</filter-mapping>
This sets the request encoding of all JSF POST requests to UTF-8.
This should fix the Unicode problem in the JSF side. I have never used PDFBox, but since it's under the covers using iText which in turn should already be supporting Unicode/UTF-8, I think that part is fine. Let me know if it still doesn't after doing the above fixes.
See also:
Unicode - How to get the characters right?
On the web pages in our app, the trademark symbol (TM) is appearing as a questions mark. The registered trademark (R) works, though. We are displaying the value using the c:out tag in the JSP standard library. If I put ™ or ™ on the page to test this, those show up as they are supposed to.
<td><c:out value="${item.description}"/></td> <!-- does not work -->
<td>yada yada yada Spiros™ yada yada yada</td> <!-- works -->
To add to this, we're also using YUI, and before we display these pages, they show up in a YUI data table as the results of a query (the user clicks on a row to go to the page described above). The (TM) shows up properly in that table. That tells me that we are properly fetching the value from our database, and as well the server code generating the XML to send back to the YUI data table also works.
So why is the same String displayed properly in the YUI data table, but not in a normal JSP, unless we hardcode the symbol onto the page?
You probably have an encoding issue. If you do not have an explicit encoding in your JSP:
<%# page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" pageEncoding="UTF-8" %>
then it's time to add one. Try UTF-8 and if that doesn't work try ISO-8859-1 ... or if you know the correct encoding, use that.
When a char appears as ? inside a browser (usually Firefox) it means that page encoding (as it's detected by the browser will not recognize the char. A good test would be to View->Character Encoding->UTF-8 in firefox. If the char appears correctly then it means that the (tm) char is encoded using UTF-8 standard. You have to instruct your page to set the response encoding header to UTF-8. This should work right now for you.
If that would not work you should first find out how is the character encoded (look at what encoding is read from the database for example) and try to set the page encoding header to that encoding.
The second format works because the (TM) char is encoded as a known html entity which the browser interprets regardless of the page encoding.