For JSP pages, the page encoding is the character encoding in which the file is encoded.
For JSP pages in standard syntax, the page encoding is determined from the following sources:
The page encoding value of a JSP property group (see Setting Properties for Groups of JSP Pages) whose URL pattern matches the page.
The pageEncoding attribute of the page directive of the page. It is a translation-time error to name different encodings in the pageEncoding attribute of the page directive of a JSP page and in a JSP property group.
The CHARSET value of the contentType attribute of the page directive.
If none of these is provided, ISO-8859-1 is used as the default page encoding.
For JSP pages in XML syntax (JSP documents), the page encoding is determined as described in section 4.3.3 and appendix F.1 of the XML specification.
The pageEncoding and contentType attributes determine the page character encoding of only the file that physically contains the page directive. A web container raises a translation-time error if an unsupported page encoding is specified.