Geek

We had a standard JSP header with logo and menu, and we used it to include a few static HTML pages (e.g. privacy policy and about us). We had multiple versions of the static content in different languages, and the non-English ones shows up in gibberish, although the menu shows up fine.

We already specified the encoding in our enclosing JSP page.

<%@ page pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>

as well as specified the charset in the meta header

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

A common “workaround” is to convert the html to JSP to specify the encoding. However being lazy developers, we want a better solution. Eventually we found the hint to set the encoding in web.xml. We tweaked the extension from .jsp to .html and it works!

<jsp-config>
  <jsp-property-group>
    <url-pattern>*.html</url-pattern>
    <page-encoding>UTF-8</page-encoding>
  </jsp-property-group>
</jsp-config>