Spring saved my day on an UTF-8 encoding problem

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I'm working on Jasig CAS (an SSO server) and I had an issue with special chars. For example, it was impossible to log in with a password like &é"'(-.
  • I checked my jsp file :it was encoded in UTF-8
  • I checked the encoding directive (<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" %>) : OK
The idea was to force the request encoding with something like :

request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");

But I was in Spring MVC and I didn't want an ugly hack. Fortunately, Spring saved my day with a builtin servlet filter to declare in the web.xml.

<filter>
<filter-name>characterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
<filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>encoding</param-name>
<param-value>UTF-8</param-value>
</init-param>
<init-param>
<param-name>forceEncoding</param-name>
<param-value>true</param-value>
</init-param>
</filter>

<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>characterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>