Problem with request parameter in UTF-8 (Unicode)

[Frank Peters <f....@globrain.org>]

I have a JSP page including a form, all encoded in UTF-8, which
reaches the requesting browser just fine. The browser then submits the
form (GET or POST, same problem) to another JSP page on the same
server. When I try to read the request parameters via
request.getParameter("somename"), I receive garbage for every
character in the form fields not in the standard ASCII charset. The
request.getCharacterEncoding() function returns null.

I seems to me the received parameters are converted from ISO 8859-1 to
UTF-8 by Tomcat, though they already are encoded in UTF-8. Am I
missing a configuration setting, like some sort of default character
encoding? I have looked through loads of docs and the config files
themselves, but I did not find anything (except for the
"file.encoding=UTF_8" which I needed for sending the unicode pages).
I would appreciate any help.

TIA,
Frank Peters