Locale-Sensitive Java Method

javax.servlet.ServletResponse

public void setLocale(Locale locale)

Internationalization (I18n) Method Overview

This method sets the locale of the http response as well as the response's character encoding if the character encoding has not already been explicitly set using setContentType(String type) or setCharacterEncoding(String encoding) and if ServletResponse.getWriter hasn't been called yet. If the web application's deployment descriptor contains a locale-encoding-mapping-list element, and that element provides a mapping for the given locale, that mapping is used. Otherwise, the mapping from locale to character encoding is container dependent.

In servlet 2.2 environments, the setLocale method generally maps the specified locale to a native character encoding that is not Unicode. The following call
 response.setLocale(new Locale("ja_JP"));
results in a character set of Shift_JIS, which was a common, pre-Unicode encoding used on Japanese systems and provides an encoding for all Japanese characters.

I18n Issues

It is recommended I18n practice to use the UTF-8 character encoding for web content in order to ensure support for all languages. Because setLocale encodes the data using a non-Unicode encoding unless otherwise specified in the web application's deployment descriptor, it is recommended that developers replace these calls with a call that explicitly sets the encoding to UTF-8, such as setCharacterEncoding.

Suggested Replacement

Instead of:

response.setLocale(localeObject);

Use:

response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF_8");