Issue with ((JspWriterImpl)out).setEncoding("UTF-8")

Question

We are trying to set UTF-8 charset in all of the HTTP response headers. When
we add the following line to the JSP pages, the browser renders the page
perfectly:
<% response.setHeader("Content-Type", "text/html; charset=UTF-8"); %>
However, we don't want to add this line to every JSP page. Instead, we
would like to use the "weblogic.jsp.encoding" propriety or the -Dencoding
flag for the JSP compiler. This command automatically add the following TWO
lines to the compiled JSP:
((weblogic.servlet.jsp.JspWriterImpl)out).setEncoding("UTF-8");
response.setHeader("Content-Type", "text/html; charset=UTF-8");
We need the response.setHeader method, but the out.setEncoding method screws
up the display of the page. High ascii characters like m-dash do not get
displayed properly. Its seems like the out.setEncoding double encodes the
UTF-8 stream.
Does anyone know what exactly the out.setEncoding method does and is there
anyway for the jsp compiler to add just the response.setHeader method and
not the out.setEncoding method?
BTW, the configuration is:
WLS 5.1 sp8
JDK1.3
Solaris
Netscape web server w/ weblogic's NSAPI plugin
Thanks,
Andrew

Answer 1

The line:
response.setHeader("Content-Type", "text/html; charset=UTF-8");
causes a header that looks like:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
to be sent back to the browser, but unfortunately, the browser does not
react to this header. You have to add a meta tag to your page so that
the browser will interpret the characters it is getting properly:
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
mark
Andrew Heifetz wrote:
We are trying to set UTF-8 charset in all of the HTTP response headers. When
we add the following line to the JSP pages, the browser renders the page
perfectly:
<% response.setHeader("Content-Type", "text/html; charset=UTF-8"); %>
However, we don't want to add this line to every JSP page. Instead, we
would like to use the "weblogic.jsp.encoding" propriety or the -Dencoding
flag for the JSP compiler. This command automatically add the following TWO
lines to the compiled JSP:
((weblogic.servlet.jsp.JspWriterImpl)out).setEncoding("UTF-8");
response.setHeader("Content-Type", "text/html; charset=UTF-8");
We need the response.setHeader method, but the out.setEncoding method screws
up the display of the page. High ascii characters like m-dash do not get
displayed properly. Its seems like the out.setEncoding double encodes the
UTF-8 stream.
Does anyone know what exactly the out.setEncoding method does and is there
anyway for the jsp compiler to add just the response.setHeader method and
not the out.setEncoding method?
BTW, the configuration is:
WLS 5.1 sp8
JDK1.3
Solaris
Netscape web server w/ weblogic's NSAPI plugin
Thanks,
Andrew