Includes and multiple content-Type directives

Question

ok,
myGreatPage.jsp:
<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" %>
<%@ include file="header2.jsp" %>
header2.jsp:
<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" %>
this triggers an error, that i cant have multiple occurrences of "contentType", which is logical, but imagine if both the files above contain russian or estonian characters and therefore need to be saved in UTF8 format.
If I remove the <%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" %> from header2.jsp i get three weird characters at the top of my web page.
Help! whats the best way to do this ? thx merci beaucoup takk bitte spaciba

Answer 1

Yeah... the reason is this...
When you do an <%@ include, you are essentially telling the JSP compiler to read that included file in and insert it into the parent page. It would basically do this by opening the file itself. It's just a fancy copy/paste of the code. So you'd end up with 2 contentType directives, which is one problem.
The reason for the screwing up of the text is that when it opens the included file to read it in, it's using the character encoding that the OS or the server was started to use, probably either Cp1252 or ISO8895-1, which of course, screws up the UTF-8 chars.
The 2 ways to resolve this is to make sure the server starts with the option to use UTF-8 as the default character encoding, so it reads the files properly (presuming you've saved those files as UTF-8 encoding). Or make all the text that uses non-ASCII chars is written as Unicode escapes (\uXXXX) format. You can use the native2ascii tool to do that translation.