FreeMarker encoding confusion

Question

When I read an UTF-8 encoded template with FreeMarker, special chars are rendered correctly in the browser, although freeMarkerConfig.getDefaultEncoding() returns "Cp1252". If I set freeMarkerConfig.setDefaultEncoding("UTF-8"), I see only question marks in the browser, although "UTF-8" is the actual encoding of the template file. In every case the http header "Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8" is sent.

Any idea what is wrong?

Answer 1

Set the content type property into the FreeMarkerViewResolver.

Spring 4.2 example

@Bean
public FreeMarkerViewResolver freemarkerViewResolver() {
    FreeMarkerViewResolver resolver = new FreeMarkerViewResolver();
    resolver.setContentType("text/html; charset=utf-8");
    resolver.setCache(true);
    resolver.setPrefix("");
    resolver.setSuffix(".ftl.html");
    resolver.setRequestContextAttribute("rc");
    return resolver;
}

Answer 2

In the case you are using spring framework and a MimeMessage to send the email try setting content via a MimeMessagePreparator as follows (I skip the mimemessagepreparator method getMessagePreparator as the important thing is how to set content):

// Create the message helper from the received mimemessage on the preparator
MimeMessageHelper helper = new MimeMessageHelper(mimeMessage, true);
// ... include the from, to, subject, freemarker html generation here... text is the String variable with generated html
// Set the content as follows instead of helper.setText(text, true);
helper.getMimeMessage().setContent(text, "text/html;charset=utf-8");

This worked for me and browsers are displaying chars correctly when sending emails.

The implied classes are:

import org.springframework.mail.javamail.MimeMessageHelper;
import org.springframework.mail.javamail.MimeMessagePreparator;
import javax.mail.internet.MimeMessage;

Also be sure that your workspace has a default encoding of UTF-8 for the template files by right clicking on them looking properties if you are using eclipse IDE.

Hope this helps.