Java Servlet Programming

Appendix E. Charsets

Table 5.1 lists the suggested charset(s) for a number of languages. Charsets are used by servlets that generate multilingual output; they determine which character encoding a servlet’s PrintWriter is to use. By default, the PrintWriter uses the ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) charset, appropriate for most Western European languages. To specify an alternate charset, the charset value must be passed to the setContentType() method before the servlet retrieves its PrintWriter. For example:

res.setContentType("text/html; charset=Shift_JIS");  // A Japanese charset
PrintWriter out = res.getWriter();  // Writes Shift_JIS Japanese

Note that not all web browsers support all charsets or have the fonts available to represent all characters, although at minimum all clients support ISO-8859-1. Also, the UTF-8 charset can represent all Unicode characters and may be assumed a viable alternative for all languages.

Table E-1. Suggested Charsets

Language	Language Code	Suggested Charsets
Albanian	sq	ISO-8859-2
Arabic	ar	ISO-8859-6
Bulgarian	bg	ISO-8859-5
Byelorussian	be	ISO-8859-5
Catalan (Spanish)	ca	ISO-8859-1
Chinese (Simplified/Mainland)	zh	GB2312
Chinese (Traditional/Taiwan)	zh (country TW)	Big5
Croatian	hr	ISO-8859-2
Czech	cs	ISO-8859-2
Danish	da	ISO-8859-1
Dutch	nl	ISO-8859-1
English	en	ISO-8859-1
Estonian	et	ISO-8859-1
Finnish	fi	ISO-8859-1
French	fr	ISO-8859-1
German	de	ISO-8859-1
Greek	el	ISO-8859-7
Hebrew	he (formerly iw)	ISO-8859-8 ...