Java Servlet Programming

Appendix E. Charsets

Table E-1lists the suggested charset(s) for a number of languages. Charsets are used by servlets that generate multilingual output; they determine which character encoding a servlet's PrintWriter is to use. By default, the PrintWriter uses the ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) charset, appropriate for most Western European languages. To specify an alternate charset, the charset value must be passed to the setContentType() method before the servlet retrieves its PrintWriter. For example:

res.setContentType("text/html; charset=Shift_JIS");  // A Japanese charset
PrintWriter out = res.getWriter();  // Writes Shift_JIS Japanese

Note that not all web browsers support all charsets or have the fonts available to represent all characters, although at minimum all clients support ISO-8859-1. Also, the UTF-8 charset can represent all Unicode characters and may be assumed a viable alternative for all languages.

Table E-1. Suggested Charsets

[1] First supported in JDK 1.1.6. Earlier versions of the JDK know the EUC-JP character set by the name EUCJIS, so for portability you can set the character set to EUC-JP and manually construct an EUCJIS PrintWriter.

[2] First supported in JDK 1.1.6. Earlier versions of the JDK know the EUC-KR character set by the name KSC_5601, so for portability you can set the character set to EUC-KR and manually construct a KSC_5601 PrintWriter.

Appendix D. Character Entities

Copyright © 2001 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved.