How to change Tomcat default character encoding

We faced an issue last week on linux machine,

In a tomcat deployed server, The non-english characters getting from web services are not displaying correctly.

We write a main program in java and retrieved the data through web-service. its parsed well and correctly displayed the non-english character.

So the issue is with tomcat, after investigation we found this.

In the catalina.bat (catalina.sh) add the java args...

set JAVA_OPTS=-Djavax.servlet.request.encoding=UTF-8 -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

then all encodings seem to come across as UTF-8 by default.. 

This resolved the problem.

source: http://marc.info/?l=tomcat-user&m=108576957301771&w=3

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+20110113
Added some more info:

Configuring Tomcat's URI encoding

By default, Tomcat uses ISO-8859-1 character encoding when decoding URLs received from a browser. This can cause problems when Confluence's encoding is UTF-8, and you are using international characters in attachment or page names.

1. Edit conf/server.xml and find the line where the Coyote HTTP Connector is defined. It will look something like this, possibly with more parameters:

   <Connector port="8080"/>

2. Add a URIEncoding="UTF-8" property to the connector:

   <Connector port="8080" URIEncoding="UTF-8"/>

3. Restart Tomcat

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Also check this

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space on java Tomcat server, linux

I got this error last day when try to open an jsp page,

server is Tomcat5.5 and os is linux

I found this link http://www.mkyong.com/tomcat/tomcat-javalangoutofmemoryerror-permgen-space/ it was very helpful to fix the issue

1. I just added the following code to my catalina.sh file

JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -XX:MaxPermSize=256m"

2.

You can create jsp page with the following code to evalute your memory details

# <%@ page import="java.lang.management.*, java.util.*" %><%

# response.setContentType("text/html");

# Iterator iter = ManagementFactory.getMemoryPoolMXBeans().iterator();

# while(iter.hasNext()){

# MemoryPoolMXBean item = (MemoryPoolMXBean) iter.next();

# MemoryUsage mu = item.getUsage();

# long used = mu.getUsed();

# long committed = mu.getCommitted();

# long max = mu.getMax();

# %>

# MEMORY TYPE: <%=item.getName()%>

# Used: <%=used%>

# Committed: <%= committed%>

# Max: <%=max%>

# <%}%>

The output look like

localhost

MEMORY TYPE: Code Cache

Used: 4 mb

Committed: 4 mb

Max: 48 mb

------------------------------------

MEMORY TYPE: PS Eden Space

Used: 25 mb

Committed: 33 mb

Max: 54 mb

------------------------------------

MEMORY TYPE: PS Survivor Space

Used: 0 mb

Committed: 1 mb

Max: 1 mb

------------------------------------

MEMORY TYPE: PS Old Gen

Used: 10 mb

Committed: 227 mb

Max: 455 mb

------------------------------------

MEMORY TYPE: PS Perm Gen

Used: 14 mb

Committed: 16 mb

Max: 64 mb

------------------------------------

After add this code JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -XX:MaxPermSize=256m"

I got PS Perm Gen size as

MEMORY TYPE: PS Perm Gen

Used: 14 mb

Committed: 16 mb

Max: 256 mb