How can I read GET or POST parameters that were encoded in an international character set? Also, when a user fills in an HTML Form using a custom Input Method Editor for, say, Japanese, how can my servlet/JSP know which encoding was used?

Created Aug 28, 2000

Jan Borchers

The HttpServletRequest object from 2.0 on provides a method for retrieving the client's character encoding. The follwing sample gets the parameter mytext and converts it to a java Unicode string.


public String getText(HttpServletRequest request)
{
  String value = request.getParameter("mytext");

  try{
    value = new String(value.getBytes(), request.getCharacterEncoding());
  }catch(java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException ex){
    System.err.println(ex);
  }

  return value;
}

See also