Re: Character encoding issues

On 24-Aug-2016 09:43 -0700, James H. H. Lampert wrote:

[…]
We're having a weird problem with character encoding in a Tomcat
webapp.

[…]
On the Midrange box, the traffic between us and GMail is getting
garbled (Chinese characters appear, seemingly at random), with an
apparent character encoding conflict. On the Linux box, it isn't.
Not sure about the Windows box.

Now, on the Midrange box, it's a fairly straightforward process to
look at the Java System Properties for a JVM. For the JVM Tomcat is
running in, "Initial Java System Properties" shows

file.encoding 'ISO8859_1'

and "Current Java System Properties" shows

os.encoding 'ISO8859-1'
sun.jnu.encoding 'ISO8859-1'
sun.io.unicode.encoding 'UnicodeBig'
ibm.system.encoding 'ISO8859-1'
file.encoding 'ISO8859_1'

I found JConsole and JVisualVM on the Linux box, and while I
couldn't find system properties in JConsole, I could in JVisualVM.
I have:

file.encoding=UTF-8
sun.jnu.encoding=UTF-8
sun.io.unicode.encoding=UnicodeLittle

Can somebody enlighten me on whether this is the cause of the
encoding issue with Google, and what to do about it?

WAG: If the data is, and likely is, UTF-8, then claiming the data is encoded CCSID 819, probably is going to cause problems. I have no idea about those properties [e.g. os.encoding and ibm.system.encoding noted to be using an ASCII CCSID seems amiss on an EBCDIC system], but likely one [the sun.jnu.encoding I would expect minimally] or more properties [e.g. if the /files/ are consistent across the servers, then file.encoding would seem appropriately to be consistent as well] could be changed to UTF-8, to perhaps see a corrective effect.?