Question

Character Encoding Problem in JSP

Asked by: uncertainty

Hi ALL,

I was testing JavaMail and tried to develop a custom mail client which retrieved mail from Yahoo account, and displayed information such as sender, subject, date etc of emails on a JSP page.

My JSP page dedicated for displaying retrieved information could not present all characters found in email messages. There were question marks (?) on the page, which should originally be Chinese characters. I should mention that some Chinese characters were displayed correctly on the same page.
I have tried 2 values for page encoding of the JSP, they were UTF-8 and Big5 using:
1)pageEncoding="value"
2)contentType="text/html; charset=value"
3)request.setCharacterEncoding("value")
... all did not work.

I used System.out.println on the JSP (just before outputting the value using <%=) to print the value to Tomcat's stdout.log. The result was that, Chinese characters displayable on the JSP were shown ??? in the log file; while ??? on the JSP were shown correctly in the log.

As an additional information (which may or may not help in my case), My OS is running XP Pro Eng with locale set to US.

Should you have suggestions / solutions, please feel free to tell.

Thanks in advance,
k

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Asked On
2005-09-01 at 08:48:02ID21547857
Tags

chinese

,

encoding

,

jsp

,

problem

Topic

Java Server Pages (JSP)

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
11

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Answers

 

by: bloodredsunPosted on 2005-09-01 at 10:05:35ID: 14803981

SO you've tried
<% response.setContentType("text/html; charset=big5");%>
or
<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=big5" %>

and do you have the character sets installed on your machine?

 

by: uncertaintyPosted on 2005-09-01 at 18:30:24ID: 14807042

Yes I used <%@ page contentType..........%> to set the character encoding for the response.

The character sets should be there since some Chinese characters could be displayed correctly. Forgot to mention that I did an extra test yesterday. From another Yahoo mail account using Big5 as language preference, I duplicated an email read with ??? characters (duplicating readable characters from Yahoo webmail ofcourse, not duplicating ???) and sent to the previous Yahoo account, the characters in such email can be displayed correctly. Hence it should be sufficient to show that the charset is there.

Thanks for your comment,
k

 

by: jimaricatPosted on 2005-09-03 at 23:48:17ID: 14818604

hi,

First of all specify the content type and character set from within your JSP.
<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=big5" %> or Use a HTTP meta tag as a hint to the browser (I don't think this is essential, but it all helps). <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=big5" />

but in your case, i think the content itself has to be coded before it get displayed.

String emailContent = new String(String.valueOf(msg.getContent()).getBytes(),"big5");

try the luck
jim

 

by: uncertaintyPosted on 2005-09-05 at 18:11:34ID: 14826139

hello jim,

I followed you to <%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=big5" %>, and coded the content before displayed, i.e. String emailContent = new String(String.valueOf(msg.getContent()).getBytes(),"big5");

I could achieve a reverse result compared to previous one, i.e. same result I found from Tomcat's stdout.log. (details referred to my post of question)

I was noted that if I did not code the content (in fact I was stucked in displaying merely the sender and subject of each message), the result was reversed again.

I have tried new String(subject.getBytes(), enc) where enc was obtained from:

if (msg instanceof MimeMessage){enc = ((MimeMessage)msg).getEncoding();} but enc either returns "8bit" or "null" which were not helpful in my case.

Thanks for your comment,
k

 

by: jimaricatPosted on 2005-09-05 at 21:57:37ID: 14826772

then you could try in stream level

ByteArrayInputStream bis = ((MimeMessage)msg).getRawInputStream(); // this will decode the raw data itself.
byte[] b = new byte[bis.available()];
bis.read(b);

String mesg = new String(b,"big5");

rgds,
Jim






 

by: uncertaintyPosted on 2005-09-14 at 21:07:43ID: 14886707

hi there,

I am still unable to get the sender and subject to be displayed correctly. I tried to forward "problematic" email(s) to another email account of mine, without doing any explicit coding of data mentioned before, all of them were displayed correctly. The only thing I must make sure is to set the content type using page directive <%@page contentType="..............%>

Would such behaviour relate to language (or locale, i have no idea) of the email server from which i received email?

k

 

by: bloodredsunPosted on 2005-09-15 at 01:13:21ID: 14887441

>>Would such behaviour relate to language (or locale, i have no idea) of the email server from which i received email?

I suppose that if the mail server did not have the character set installed then this could be a possible reason.

I occasionally have to send out emails in Chinese (big5) and the content type is all I have to change to it to work so I was at a loss to explain this behaviour.

 

by: bloodredsunPosted on 2005-12-27 at 10:54:32ID: 15557329

agreed

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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