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POWhy is no encoding set in response by Tomcat? How can I deal with it?
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  1. POWhy is no encoding set in response by Tomcat? How can I deal with it?
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    copied!<p>I had recently a problem with encoding of websites generated by servlet, that occurred if the servlets were deployed under Tomcat, but not under Jetty. I did a little bit of research about it and simplified the problem to the following servlet:</p> <pre><code>public class TestServlet extends HttpServlet implements Servlet { @Override public void service(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException { response.setContentType("text/plain"); Writer output = response.getWriter(); output.write("öäüÖÄÜß"); output.flush(); output.close(); } } </code></pre> <p>If I deploy this under Jetty and direct the browser to it, it returns the expected result. The data is returned as ISO-8859-1 and if I take a look into the headers, then Jetty returns:</p> <pre><code>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 </code></pre> <p>The browser detects the encoding from this header. If I deploy the same servlet in Tomcat, the browser shows up strange characters. But Tomcat also returns the data as ISO-8859-1, the difference is, that no header tells about it. So the browser has to guess the encoding, and that goes wrong.</p> <p>My question is, is that behaviour of Tomcat correct or a bug? And if it is correct, how can I avoid this problem? Sure, I can always add <code>response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");</code> to the servlet, but that means I set a fixed encoding, that the browser might or might not understand. The problem is more relevant, if no browser but another service accesses the servlet. So how I should deal with the problem in the most flexible way?</p>
 

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