The problem I had today was with the good old character encoding: I was able to store German Umlaut characters (üöä) properly in MySql, but whenever I retrieved them, they would be scrambled - regardless of whether I displayed the result on a web page or just printed it to the console.
So, the problem is: how to consistently set UTF-8 as the character encoding of choice throughout the whole stack:
- for MySql as well as for any session coming through the JDBC driver in order to ensure that any entity created by Hibernate/JPA uses UTF-8
- for Tomcat to make sure that any data served uses UTF-8
I know that you'll find a lot of material on the solution for each individual piece of software in my tech stack across the net. However, I still think it's worth to post this solution as I did not find all elements of it in one place (and don't want to search again the next time :-)
Here's what I did:
1. Ensure that MySql runs on UTF-8 as default: in the MySql configuration file my.cnf add the following in the section for mysqld:
[mysqld]
...
default-character-set=utf8
default-collation=utf8_general_ci
...
2. Configure your MySql JDBC driver connection as follows (obviously hostname, port and schema are probably different in your configuration :-):
jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test?useUnicode=true&connectionCollation=utf8_general_ci&characterSetResults=utf8
When configuring the above driver URL in your Spring XML context definition, don't forget to escape the Ampersand as you will get parsing errors otherwise.
3. Configure Tomcat for UTF-8 by adding the following line to your : catalina.bat or catalina.sh:
JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Djavax.servlet.request.encoding=UTF-8 -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8"
Versions I am using: MySql 5.0, Tomcat 6.0.20, Spring 2.5.6, Java 6, MySql Connector 5.1.6
Happy hacking!
