How do I supress the encoding of UTF-8 characters in a f:param element

Question

Hello,
I have a keyboard displayed on my page, which won't work properly because of the used german characters.
I have an icon for every button embedded in a link, which adds the selected character to the searchstring.
For example adding an a works like this:
from keyboard.xhtml:
<s:link><f:param name="#{keyname}" value="#{keyword}a"/><h:graphicImage value="key_a.png"/></s:link>keyname and keyword are parameters submitted by the including form:
from myform.xhtml:
<ui:param name="keyword" value="#{end}"/>
<ui:param name="keyname" value="end"/>This works great as long as the character is a standard one, but on as soon as I have a german umlaut in the string, the umlaut gets encoded/escaped with every single character that i add to the searchstring:
The string makes it's way correctly to the keyboard-template, I can use a h:outputText to show it on the page and it doesn't get escaped.
So, how can I prevent the escaping of my characters in the f:params elements?
I really need to get this to work. so any hint or even solution would be fabulous.
Thanks in advance, Peter
PS: maybe my web server is doing something nasty, so it would be nice, if someone can check this code:
<s:link><f:param name="test" value="�"/>INIT</s:link><br/>
<s:link><f:param name="test" value="#{test}"/>REPEAT</s:link><br/>
INFO: <h:outputText value="#{test}" /><br/>here is the same one with h:outputLink
<h:outputLink><f:param name="test" value="�"/>INIT</h:outputLink><br/>
<h:outputLink><f:param name="test" value="#{test}"/>REPEAT</h:outputLink><br/>
INFO: <h:outputText value="#{test}" /><br/>EDIT: I found the solution, it was my beloved jboss application server, after adding a parameter to the server.xml, everything worked as expected:
use page settings:
<Connector port="8080" .....
useBodyEncodingForURI="true" ..../>hardcoded:
<Connector port="8080" .....
URIEncoding="UTF-8" ..../> Edited by: pete007 on Mar 12, 2008 1:47 PM

Answer 1

"Encoding" refers to the charset used to convert the Unicode data into bytes. But since you're writing to a String, you aren't converting the data to bytes and therefore UTF-16 is the appropriate encoding. It doesn't make sense to ask for your data to be encoded in UTF-8 when you aren't producing bytes.
You could read this tutorial about XML and Unicode and encodings for more information:
http://skew.org/xml/tutorial/