File upload problem: UTF-8 encoding not honored when form has multipart/form-data

The problem that I was facing was something like this. I was using Apache Commons File Upload library to upload and download some file.

I had a form in which user can upload a file and another field 'name' in which she can give any name to the file being loaded.


When I submitted the form, the file was uploaded fine but the value in name field was garbled. I followed all the possible suggestions I found:

1. <%@page pageEncoding="UTF-8"%> set.
2. <%@page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8"%gt; set after the first directive.
3. <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8"> in the head.
4. enctype="multipart/form-data" attribute in the form.
5. accept-charset="UTF-8" attribute in the form.

in the Servlet:

1. before doing any operations on request object: request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");

For accessing the value

FileItem item = (FileItem) iter.next();

if (item.isFormField()) {

//For regular form field:

name = item.getFieldName();

//converting from default encoding to UTF-8.

value = new String(item.getString().getBytes(), "UTF-8");

}

But this too didn't work. Finally after lot of trial and error methods, this is the call which set everything right.

value = item.getString("UTF-8").trim();

I was able to get the value in text field correct, ungarbled!