Special Characters in Spring MVC

You might be surprised to see when you type special characters on the form and in the controller, it comes in wrong e.g.

I typed a copy right sign, "©".  It came in as "©".

Even though I have already set my page's encoding to UTF-8, it didn't work.

The problem is Spring tried to encode using ISO-8859-1 still.  I think it is because, per Servlet standard, that is the default request/response encoding.

The solution is simple; we just have to explicitly set the encoding we want using CharacterEncodingFilter.  Thank to a post in Spring Forum.

Add the following to your web.xml.

<filter>
   <filter-name>springCharacterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
   <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-class>
   <init-param>
     <param-name>encoding</param-name>
     <param-value>UTF-8</param-value>
   </init-param>
   <init-param>
     <param-name>forceEncoding</param-name>
     <param-value>true</param-value>
   </init-param>
   </filter>
 
 <filter-mapping>
   <filter-name>springCharacterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
   <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
 </filter-mapping>