bedeviled mojo slop

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If you're using Tomcat 5, say Tomcat 5.0.19, and you're having issues with international characters in your URIs, then you might want to look at your server.xml file and check out the settings for various defined <Connector .../> elements. Why? According to the URIencoding attribute documentation for this element in the Tomcat 5 connector documentation, "This specifies the character encoding used to decode the URI bytes, after %xx decoding the URL. If not specified, ISO-8859-1 will be used.". A simple fix as given below was all this server needed to be happy as demonstrated hm'yah.

<Connector port="8009"
   enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" debug="0"
   protocol="AJP/1.3" URIEncoding="UTF-8"/>

The default for this option, IMHO, should be UTF-8 and not ISO-8859-1. Did I dream it that there was a relevant W3C specification where it was specified that UTF-8 should be the default encoding used for URIs? Maybe. I'm looking now, but if you know in particular, point me at it and I'll update this entry appropriately.

Update: Character Encoding in URI references. So, you still get the restricted US-ASCII subset allowed in URIs, but the encoding of the characters to bytes is done using UTF-8.

• 1. Each disallowed character is converted to UTF-8, resulting in one or more bytes.
• 2. The resulting bytes are escaped using the URI escaping mechanism (that is, each byte is converted to %HH, where HH is the byte value expressed using hexadecimal notation).
• 3. The original character is replaced by the resulting character sequence.