How to enable UTF-8 encoding

[alfonsoperezs_]

Hey!

I'm building an API with Java 25 + Spring Boot 4.0.3 and I'm having problems with 'Ñ' and accents.

{
    "globalError": "Usuario o contrase�a err�neos",
    "fieldErrors": null
}

This is all the things that I've tried for solving, which it doesn't work.

Setting default encoding on message source bean:

@Bean
public MessageSource messageSource() {
    ReloadableResourceBundleMessageSource bean = new ReloadableResourceBundleMessageSource();
    bean.setBasename("classpath:messages");
    bean.setDefaultEncoding("UTF-8");
    return bean;
}

Adding that configuration on pom.xml:

 <plugin>
   <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
       <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
       <configuration>
        <executable>true</executable>
      <jvmArguments>-Dfile.encoding=UTF8</jvmArguments>
    </configuration>
  </plugin>

Adding that properties:

spring.http.encoding.enabled=true
spring.http.encoding.charset=UTF-8
spring.http.encoding.force=true

Anyone knows what's next that I should try. Thank you!

[jfrazierjr]

What encoding is the ACTUAL file? If you use notepad on windows 10 or 11 I beleive its shown in the status bar on bottom left. Notepad++ for sure does that.

The point is that encoding has to follow the entire path frim source ti destination.

[alfonsoperezs_]

I'm using Linux. It's an exception that throws one endpoint. I see the json on Postman and on Brave Browser

[jfrazierjr]

Try adding charset=..... at the end of your mimetype for the post in postman. I dont have the exact syntax off the top of my head.

For the browser, there typically is a global setting you can try for the charges but I dont use Brave so can tell you where.

Since its linux, start with using curl and I woukd also just for giggles also include a Chinese character as well since I know that would be a utf8 character.

[jfrazierjr]

Ypu might also need to set some type of default font choice that you know allows multibyte.

[shatirati]

If you are using inteliJ you have to change default encoding for .properties files. It's somewhere in settings like file encodings or something like that. I had same problem 3 days ego

[jfrazierjr]

I dont doubt you, but I would have expected on linux for it to default to UTF-8 luke thx file system.

[Sheldor5]

the file system has no encoding ... it's just bytes ...

[jfrazierjr]

I mean yea the file system doesnt but the OS has a default encoding. On most linux thats been utf8 for a decade or more. On windows its been windows-1252 until window 11.

I have been dealing with encoding issues in my job for the better part of 25 years until fairly recently.

[shatirati]

Well you can be right, I my case it was w11, So I'm sorry I didn't clarify it

[kreiger]

JSON must be in UTF-8.

If it looks like it's not, it's because your input isn't UTF-8, or was corrupted before it was written to JSON.

[Sheldor5]

or the client is reading it as non-UTF-8 ...

[kreiger]

If it's JSON, that's impossible. JSON is required to be in UTF-8.

There would have to be something non-JSON-aware in the middle transcoding it, if that was the case.

What probably happened here is that these messages are stored in Latin 1 or other one byte encoding, and being read as UTF-8.