Java Strings as Unicode Encoded Byte Sequences

JSP Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Non-ASCII Characters Support in JSP Pages

∟Java Strings as Unicode Encoded Byte Sequences

This section provides a tutorial example on how to use Java String data type to enter non-ASCII character as Unicode characters. Java Servlet technology is smart to convert Unicode characters into the encoding specified in the setContentType() call.

Let's try option 2 mentioned in the previous section now, which uses Java Strings to enter non-ASCII characters as Unicode characters. Java Servlet technology can automatically convert them in the HTML response in any other specified encoding. Here is my sample JSP page, HelpGB2312Unicode.jspx:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<jsp:root xmlns:jsp="http://java.sun.com/JSP/Page" version="2.3">
<!-- HelpGB2312Unicode.jspx
 - Copyright (c) 2006 HerongYang.com. All Rights Reserved.
-->
<jsp:scriptlet><![CDATA[
   response.setContentType("text/html; charset=gb2312");
   out.println("<html>");
   out.println("<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\""
      + " content=\"text/html; charset=gb2312\"/>");
   out.println("<body>");
   out.println("<b>\u8bf4\u660e</b><br/>");
   out.println("<p>\u8fd9\u662f\u4e00\u4efd\u975e\u5e38\u95f4\u5355"
      + "\u7684\u8bf4\u660e\u4e66\u2026</p>");
   out.println("</body>");
   out.println("</html>");
]]></jsp:scriptlet>
</jsp:root>

When I opened HelpGB2312Unicode.jspx with IE, I saw Chinese characters correctly displayed on the screen. Remember I have Unicode Chinese fonts installed on my system. So option 2 works! But note that:

Option 2 looks much simpler than option 1. No need to output HTML documents in binary mode.
response.setContentType() must be called before any output statements.
Java Servlet technology is smart to convert Unicode characters into the encoding specified in the setContentType() call.
"out" is ready to use with the specified encoding schema embedded.
The Chinese characters must be entered as Unicode codes, not GB2312 codes.

If your Chinese text is in GB2312 encoding format, you need to convert the text to Unicode codes in "\u" format. One good tool for this is native2ascii from JDK 1.8 or older. Here is a sample command to convert HelpGB2312.html:

herong> native2ascii -encoding gb2312 HelpGB2312.html test.html

You could also enter non ASCII characters as Unicode codes in UTF-8 format. This is very easy to do, if you have a special text editor that supports Unicode UTF-8 encoding and input interface for your local language characters.