@Trevor: The option-Tag does not support the filter-Attribute :-(
let's have a look.
Examine the characterset you are using to save your files. standard might be iso-8859-1, us-ascii or something like this. Try to save the files in iso-8859-1 (LATIN-1).
use this in your jsp-page:
<%@ page pageEncoding="iso-8859-1" %>
this assures a header to be sent to the client telling the page's character encoding is "iso-8859-1". Some servers will not allow these headers to be sent so you can additionally add this (quite early) to your page's <HEAD>-section:
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
The page should be displayed correct now.
When sending back the form's content the byte stream encoded by the browser must be interpreted by your application server that builds up the HttpServletRequest-Wrapper including parameters etc. When using
Tomcat, you can examine the charset used by reading the file:
$CATALINA_BASE/server/lib/catalina.jar$org.apache.catalina.util.CharsetMapperDefault.properties.
Dependent on the client's accept-language-request-header the specified charset will be used to build up the Strings.
Information about encoding can also be found here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/charset.html There is also a way to tell which encodings the server should accept:
<html:form action="/anAction.do" acceptCharset="iso-8859-1">...</...>
And you can tell the system which defaultEncoding to use:
e.g.:
java -Dfile.encoding=CP1252
wow. encoding is never funny. maybe you can find out what's the problem. let us know!
Hope it helps you on the way,
Michael