Using UTF-8 characters in portlet

First - your theme has to support UTF-8 characters, sending appropriate meta tag to you browser.

There are two ways you may use UTF-8 characters in your portlet

1. Printing data inside your portlet with response.getWriter()

In this case UTF-8 will work as is.

2. Dispatching jsp page

If you're dispatching a jsp page in your portlet you have to explicitly set contentType with charset in your page directive.

It should look like this:

<%@ page language="java" extends="org.jboss.portal.core.servlet.jsp.PortalJsp" contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"%>

If you don't specify the charset, JSP engine will convert your characters to ISO-8859-1 and break all utf-8 chars.

Configuring tomcat to support UTF-8 in parameters

There's known problem with Tomcat that uses default encoding for parameters (again ISO-8859-1).

To force it use UTF-8 edit your ${DEPLOY.DIR}/jbossweb-tomcat55.sar/service.xml or {/jboss-web.deployer/server.xml} then find all connectors declaration you use and add URIEncoding="UTF-8"

it should like like this (for 8080 - you have to add this in all connectors you use - for example in 8443 for secure connections):

<!-- A HTTP/1.1 Connector on port 8080 -->
 <Connector port="8080" address="${jboss.bind.address}"
    maxThreads="250" strategy="ms" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
    emptySessionPath="true"
    enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="100"
    connectionTimeout="20000" disableUploadTimeout="true" URIEncoding="UTF-8" ></Connector>