How to configure Jetty (via jettyrunner) so that it names a character set in the Content-Type response header

charsetconfigurationhttp-headersjetty

I use Jetty (via the oh-so-handy Jetty Runner) for day-to-day web application testing. One thing I've recently stumbled on is the fact that I don't get a character set called out in the "Content-Type" response header all the time. I do get it in response to my application's XMLHttpRequest transactions, but not for plain old pages loaded by <a> links or whatever.

I've read a little bit about how to set up a Jetty config file, but I've never been able to completely understand that; all servlet containers are complicated, and while Jetty is pretty simple it's just weird enough that I don't grok the overall idea. Thus, all I do to launch my app is to run the Jetty Runner .jar file with a couple of simple arguments to set up the port number and logfile path, and then I just give it the .war file to run. It works great — except for the missing character set 🙂

Anybody have a quick sample config file that might fix this?

edit — oh if it matters, I'm running Jetty 7.0.0 RC3; I've also tried with a slightly newer version (still 7.something) with exactly the same issue. All my testing is on Ubuntu.

Best Answer

This isn't necessarily a Jetty/Jetty Runner issue. Jetty is the Servlet container, while the response is generated by the servlet (or something higher up which ultimately implements a servlet). Without knowing what you are using above Jetty to generate your content, it is hard to say.

One thing you can do is explicitly define your char-set in the HTML itself using meta tags. HTML5 has simplified how to do this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>Example document</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Example paragraph</p>
  </body>
</html>

As opposed to the previous HTML syntax:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
    <title>Example document</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Example paragraph</p>
  </body>
</html>
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