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Characters beyond those that used to get punched on tape are encoded using different systems. It is a good idea to explictly state what encoding you want and make sure your server understands that same encoding or you can somehow do the conversion yourself. This encoding is different from the URI encoding necessary just to escape the special characters in a URL: ?&=+%/. None of these use any diacritical marks. The best is if you can encode your page using UTF-8, it takes all characters and is supported more or less Ok across all platforms. If you have one of the ISO-xxxx, it might not always work. You can see your message with all those characters in this page, look at the source, it uses UTF-8.

I'm sorry I cannot help any further. I faced the same problem and started playing with settings until I got it right and now I can't even tell you how I got there. My server is not jsp either so I can't advise on yours. If you are using the Firebug debugger in Firefox, I would go to the Net tab and check the request headers and see if it is sending the character encoding header and, if not or wrong, I would set it to confirm that it is utf-8 since I don't know what jsp would assume if no such header is present.

Can someone with knowledge in JSP help?

Thanks for your replies!!!

I checked the headers in Firebug and it said:
Content-Type text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1

I will try the page declaration and see how that works out.

I think your problem is that the default YAHOO.util.Connect.asyncRequest character set is not specified. Then you tend to get the iso-8859 setting which is not what you want.

Fix: use your own function for Yahoo asyncRequest instead of the default. From my codebase:

@Satyam, thanks for the pointer on how to set the headers.

Re whether they should be set or not: the default assumption is for the initiator (the client) is to tell the server the character set that the client will be using. Otherwise you're depending on defaults.

So, while it is possible to futz with the server to tell it that the default character set should be utf-8 instead of 8859, I think the cleaner approach is for the client to correctly tell the server what char set it is using.

The underlying problem is that the 'web-standard' for Western European/US used to be 8859. The good news is that now the standard is UTF-8 which covers far more countries. But a lot of sw and frameworks were and are defined to use 8859 as a default.

Bottom line is that it is no longer appropriate to depend upon the default char set as being "right" -- that's a sure plan for failure.

Instead, specify utf-8 everywhere, including in your db connections and table definitions.

All examples for the XDRDataSource (and client widgets) should include setting the char set to utf-8.