Bad encoding when returning a string using Spring MVC & ajax

This happens because AJAX-calls by default use browser's default encoding (f.e. ANSI). For overriding this you need to do:

jQuery style - mimeType:

$.ajax({    url:    "get_label",    mimeType:"text/html; charset=UTF-8",    success:    function(result)    {        alert(result);        $("#parameter_select label").text(result);    }});

Vanilla JS style:

xhr.overrideMimeType("text/html; charset=UTF-8")

But from the other hand you need to be sure, that server also returns appropriate response. For this you need to check the following:

1. Add UTF-8 support for web-container (i.e. Tomcat) with adding URIEncoding="UTF-8" for your Connector settings in server.xml; check this for more information.
2. If previous change didn't help (though it has to), please also make sure, that servlet response's character set is also UTF-8.

For this you can use either explicit call of method:

@RequestMapping("get_label")public @ResponseBody String getLabel(HttpServletResponse response){    String str = "בדיקה";    //set encoding explicitly    response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");    return str;}

Or, which seems to be more preferable for @ResponseBody and Spring 3.1+:

@RequestMapping(value = "get_label", produces = "text/html; charset=UTF-8")public @ResponseBody String getLabel(HttpServletResponse response){    String str = "בדיקה";    return str;}

As a conclusion I would like to clarify, that for proper handling of AJAX-calls with UTF-8 encoding, you have to make sure, that:

• web-container supports this properly
• response's character encoding is UTF-8
• AJAX request character encoding is also UTF-8