UTF-8 text is garbled when form is posted as multipart/form-data

I had the same problem using Apache commons-fileupload. I did not find out what causes the problems especially because I have the UTF-8 encoding in the following places: 1. HTML meta tag 2. Form accept-charset attribute 3. Tomcat filter on every request that sets the "UTF-8" encoding

-> My solution was to especially convert Strings from ISO-8859-1 (or whatever is the default encoding of your platform) to UTF-8:

new String (s.getBytes ("iso-8859-1"), "UTF-8");

hope that helps

Edit: starting with Java 7 you can also use the following:

new String (s.getBytes (StandardCharsets.ISO_8859_1), StandardCharsets.UTF_8);

I had the same problem and it turned out that in addition to specifying the encoding in the Filter

request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");

it is necessary to add "acceptcharset" to the form

<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data" acceptcharset="UTF-8" > 

and run the JVM with

-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

The HTML meta tag is not necessary if you send it in the HTTP header using response.setCharacterEncoding().

Just use Apache commons upload library. Add URIEncoding="UTF-8" to Tomcat's connector, and use FileItem.getString("UTF-8") instead of FileItem.getString() without charset specified.

Hope this help.

I got stuck with this problem and found that it was the order of the call to

request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");

that was causing the problem. It has to be called before any all call to request.getParameter(), so I made a special filter to use at the top of my filter chain.

https://rogerkeays.com/servletrequest-setcharactercoding-ignored