Appendix A Internationalization Issues

This appendix explains internationalization issues as it applies to the following components:

• Servlets

• JSPs

Servlets

This section describes how the Sun Java System Web Server determines the character encoding for the servlet request and the servlet response.

For encoding, see http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/intl/encoding.doc.html

Servlet Request

When processing the servlet request, the server uses the following order of precedence, first to last, to determine the character encoding for the request parameters:

• The ServletRequest.setCharacterEncoding() method.

• A hidden field in the form, if specified using the form-hint-field attribute of the parameter-encoding element in the sun-web.xml file. For more information about this element, see parameter-encoding

• The character encoding specified in the default-charset attribute of the parameter-encoding element in the sun-web.xml file. For more information about this element, see parameter-encoding

• The default encoding, which is ISO-8859-1.

Servlet Response

When processing a servlet response, the server uses the following order of precedence, first to last, to determine the response character encoding:

• The ServletResponse.setContentType() method or the ServletResponse.setLocale() method.

• The default encoding, which is ISO-8859-1.

To specify the character encoding that should be set in the Content-type header of the response if the response locale is set using the ServletResponse.setLocale method. You can use the locale-charset-map under the locale-charset-info element in the sun-web.xml file. For more information about this element, seelocale-charset-info

JSPs

A JSP page uses a character encoding. For encodings you can use, see:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/intl/encoding.doc.html

The encoding can be described explicitly using the pageEncoding attribute of the page directive. The character encoding defaults to the encoding indicated in the contentType attribute of the page directive if it is given, or to ISO-8859-1.

For more information, see the “Localization Issues” chapter of the JSP 1.2 specification, which you can be find at the following location:

http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/index.jsp

Also see the article Developing Multilingual Applications Using JavaServer Pages Technology at:

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/MultilingualJSP/index.html