Internationization

Question

Hi,
I am facing issue while displaying Japanese characters in the Text Box on an HTML/JSP page. When I take input from the user in the Text box , it shows proper japanese characters in the text box and also on the labels. But when the same is saved in the oracle database and retrieved next time and displayed in the textbox it shows the ASCII equivalent of the character . But the same appears fine when shown as the label.
Character I see in text box is amp#12486;amp#12461; amp#12473; amp#12488; whereas on labels I see actual japenese characters equivalent of these acsii values.
(Please read amp as &)
I have tried
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=shift_jis">
<%@ page contentType="text/html;charset=SHIFT_JIS" %>
But with no success . Any clues where the problem is.

Answer 1

Do you have some mechanism that escapes your strings prior to display on the HTML page?
How are you actually inserting the strings containing Japanese characters in the text box? Do you use a taglib that inserts the HTML for the INPUT field or do you simply do something like: <input type="text" value="<%=myValue%>"> where "myValue" is a string? A code snippet might help.
If you were to print the content of the string that ultimately gets inserted in the value of the input field using System.out.println(), what would the result be? A bunch of ????? or the sequence of characters "amp#12486;amp#12461; amp#12473; amp#12488;"
T