File encoding configuration in Tomcat

[david chen]

Hi,
I am having problems in reading the copyright character in Tomcat. Aside from passing -Dfile.encoding=ISO-8859-1, is there any place in Tomcat I can set how my application will read/write a text file? I'm currently having weird problem. Please refer to Character Encoding and Copyright Character to see detailed explanation of the problem.
Here's my environment configuration. I have also indicated the system properties:
1. My PC (works fine here)
- file.encoding=ISO-8859-1
- os.name=Windows XP
- os.version=5.1
2. Company's Development Box (works fine here)
- file.encoding=ISO-8859-1
- os.name=Linux
- os.version=2.4.9-e.35
3. QA Box (doesn't work)
- file.encoding=ISO-8859-1
- os.name=Linux
- os.version=2.4.9-e.38smp
Please help.
Thank you very much.
Regards,
David

[Mike Curwen]

Are the versions of Tomcat between those 3 environments the same?
You're using the same browser on the same machine to access all 3?


Have you tried explicitly setting the following:
<%@ page pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1" %>
<%@ page contentType="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" %>

(those are the defaults)

There is also a setting in $CATALINA_HOME/conf/web.xml
The *.JSP servlet is configured by default to use UTF-8 in its generated source files. Control it with the 'javaEncoding' parameter.

[david chen]

Hi Mike,
All three environments use Tomcat v3.3.1a. There's no conf/web.xml file in our Tomcat folder, I guess this file only exist for version 4x upward. And I'm using the browser on my PC to access webpages from 3 environments.
I have the following code that reads the text file:

public static String insertFile2(String file) {
   StringBuffer content = new StringBuffer();
   try {
      File input = new File(file);
      if (input.canRead()) {
         BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(input));
         String inLine = null;
         while ((inLine = in.readLine()) != null) {
            content.append(inLine + "\n");
         }
         in.close();
      }
   } catch (IOException ioEx) {
      // ...
   } finally {
      // ...
   }
   return content.toString(); //returns the string and displayed in webpage
}

And my JSP contains the following code:

<%@page contentType="text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1" %>
<%= (String)request.getAttribute("display") %>
<%-- the "display" attribute should contain the copyright character --%>

Thank you very much.
- David
[ April 08, 2004: Message edited by: david chen ]