Proper activeweb configuration for pages with foreign language characters - activeweb

Question

I have just created new web application based on activeweb framework and by default it shows me "?" for all foreign language characters. Something like this:
? ????????? ??????
???? ????????? ??
?????? ??????????
? ??? ???? ??????????
??????????? ????????
English characters are displayed ok.
Here is my web.xml config:
<display-name>activeweb</display-name>
<session-config>
<session-timeout>30</session-timeout>
</session-config>
<filter>
<filter-name>dispatcher</filter-name>
<filter-class>org.javalite.activeweb.RequestDispatcher</filter-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>exclusions</param-name>
<param-value>css,img,fonts,images,js,html,GwtExample,ico</param-value>
</init-param>
<init-param>
<param-name>root_controller</param-name>
<param-value>home</param-value>
</init-param>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>dispatcher</filter-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
<welcome-file-list>
<welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file>
</welcome-file-list>
I expect that this problem might be related to encoding in activeweb internals or I have to apply special setting. Do you know how to fix it?

Answer 1

This happens because ActiveWeb does nothing about encoding by default, and what you get comes from the servlet container.In order to force a specific encoding (UTF-8, I assume), you need to add a line of configuration to the web.xml file:
<filter>
<filter-name>dispatcher</filter-name>
<filter-class>org.javalite.activeweb.RequestDispatcher</filter-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>exclusions</param-name>
<param-value>css,images,js,ico</param-value>
</init-param>
<init-param>
<param-name>root_controller</param-name>
<param-value>home</param-value>
</init-param>
<init-param>
<param-name>encoding</param-name>
<param-value>UTF-8</param-value>
</init-param>
</filter>
This will force UTF-8 encoding on request as well as response.