Unicode/Japanese characters in a Java applet

Question

I'm writing an applet that's supposed to show both English and Japanese (unicode) characters on a JLabel. The Japanese characters show up fine when I run the applet on my system, but all I get is mojibake when I run it from the web page. The page can display Japanese characters if they're hard-coded into the HTML, but not in the applet. I'm pretty sure I've seen this sort of thing working before. Is there anything I can do in the Java code to fix this?

Answer 1

My first guess would be that the servlet container is not sending back the right character set for your webapp resources. Have a look at the response in an HTTP sniffer to see what character set is included - if the response says that the charset is e.g. CP-1252, then Japanese characters would not be decoded correctly.

You may be able to fix this in code by explicitly setting a Content-Type header with the right charset; but I'd argue it's more appropriate to fix the servlet container's config to return the correct character set for the relevant resources.

Answer 2

Well I'm not sure what was causing the problem, but I set EVERYTHING to read in and display out in UTF-8 and it seems to work now.