utf8 and hebrew in tomcat

In tomcat 5.0 and above, if your UTF-8 request parameters are received as gibberish you might need to do the following:

In your server.xml add the URIEncoding="UTF-8" and useBodyEncodingForURI="true" to the Connector tag(s):

    <Connector 
     useBodyEncodingForURI="true" 
     URIEncoding="UTF-8" 
     acceptCount="100" 
     enableLookups="false" 
     maxSpareThreads="75" 
     maxThreads="150" 
     minSpareThreads="25" 
     port="8080" 
     redirectPort="8443" />

This should make GET requests work properly.

For some reason the above does not work for POST requests. If you ask the tomcat people they'll mumble something about W3C, RFC, and RTFM. The short way to have this work for POST requests is to write a small filter to set the request encoding properly. We are using something similar to this:

package com.realcommerce.filters;
import javax.servlet.*;
import java.io.*;
public class RequestEncodingFilter implements Filter  {
    public void init(FilterConfig filterConfig) throws ServletException {
         //Do Nothing
    }
    public void destroy() {
        //Do Nothing
    }
    public void doFilter(ServletRequest request,ServletResponse response,
        FilterChain chain) throws IOException, ServletException 
    {
        request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
        chain.doFilter(request, response);
    }
}

This made POST requests pass Hebrew (or any UTF-8) parameters properly.