problem with posted data in UTF-8 and reverse proxy

Scott Douglass <scott@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> · Fri, 04 Jan 2008 17:20:51 -0500

Hi,

Please excuse the Tomcat references below, my question is actually about
the HTTPD reverse proxy feature.

I have a web app that, when viewed by hitting the Tomcat 6.0.14 server
it runs on handles the input of multi-byte characters using the UTF-8
encoding. The application is a web mail client, and it uses HTTP POST to
send the fields of the message composer window to the server.

When I put this exact same tomcat/webapp behind the HTTPD 2.2.6 reverse
proxy, the Chinese characters POST'd via the composer window gets some
other encoding than UTF-8. The end result is that when the user views
the result (say they send the mail message to themselves) the Chinese
characters are not decoded correctly.

For example, I type this into a textarea for the body of the message in
the composing form:

你好 哈哈 孔文

When I post this directly to tomcat/webapp, I see it again when I
recieve the e-mail a few seconds later (Tomcat has a /* servlet filter
that forces UTF-8 encoding on all request and response parameters, also
all JSPs have <%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" %>, and
also <meta HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
and tomcat container definition has URIEncoding="UTF-8"...)

When I post through the HTTPD 2.2.6 reverse proxy, the end result
appears like:

ä½ å¥½ å“ˆå“ˆ å”æ–‡

I've tried as many work arounds as I could search/find/think of
including:

AddDefaultCharset none

vs.

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

Neither of these solves the problem.

Has anyone ever encountered this before? I am happy with the HTTPD as a
reverse proxy other than this encoding issue, and I'm using HTTPD for a
bunch of other functions as well (WebDAV, virtual hosting, subversion
repository, etc.) So, I prefer to solve this reverse proxy problem
rather than use some other proxy server.

Thanks!

Scott

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