Forcing Tomcat to use UTF-8 Character Set in Linux

Knowledgebase

Forcing Tomcat to use UTF-8 Character Set in Linux Posted by Aly Essa on 16 June 2017 09:09 AM
Overview Many clients who have deployed FileCatalyst Workflow in a Linux environment will have other applications that could change the default character set used by the Operating System. This change could be made in the background and may not be visible to the user. When a system does not use the UTF-8 character set, there may be some issues when rendering file names. Some customers have experienced issues with users trying to download files with Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Cyrillic, Italian and other non-English characters. Tomcat has the ability to set the system’s default character set when the service starts. Environment Apache Tomcat v7.0 and v8.0. Resolution The following steps will help you add the property to set the system’s default character set to Tomcat’s startup script: Locate the startup.sh file inside /Tomcat-Home/bin/ folder. Using a text editor such as vi open startup.sh. Insert the following line after the commented section called: # ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- # Start Script for the CATALINA Server # ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- export JAVA_OPTS="-Dfile.encoding=utf-8" Save the file and close the editor.