Character encoding

[Tom Anderson <ta...@infonow.com>]

I have a question about the Tomcat implementation of the Java Servlet 
Spec (2.3) with regards to request character encoding.   Section 4.9 of 
the spec reads as follows:

SRV.4.9 Request data encoding
Currently, many browsers do not send a char encoding qualifier with the 
Content-
Type header, leaving open the determination of the character encoding 
for reading
HTTP requests. The default encoding of a request the container uses to 
create the
request reader and parse POST data must be "ISO-8859-1", if none has 
been
specified by the client request. However, in order to indicate to the 
developer in this
case the failure of the client to send a character encoding, the 
container returns null
from the getCharacterEncoding method.

My interpretation of this is that, if "charset" in the Content-Type 
header is set to something, then 
javax.servlet.ServletRequest.getCharacterEncoding() should return that 
encoding.   And if that header is not set, then it would return null 
and use "ISO-8859-1".

However, my tests of Tomcat 4.1.18 show that, for example, I can set 
charset to "Big5" (and I have verified that the Content-Type header is 
"text/html;charset=Big5" but a call to getCharacterEncoding() returns 
null.

Am I misinterpreting the spec or is this a bug in Tomcat's 
implementation?

~Tom