How to set the charset with JAX-RS?

How can I set the charset with JAX-RS? I've tried @Produces("text/html; charset=UTF-8") but that was ignored and only text/html was send with the HTTP header. I want to set the charset within a MessageBodyWriter, but don't want to extract the media type by analysing the @Produces annotation via reflection by myself.

As Daemon pointed out in a comment, the latest versions of JAX-RS (including the stable version as of September 2012) now do support the @Produces syntax. So you can just use:

@Produces("text/html; charset=UTF-8")

Just to keep it up to date. Not sure whether this was supported in older versions of Jersey, but definitely if you decide to use ResponseBuilder.header(...) method you can use MediaType method withCharset(). Like this:

return Response.status(Status.OK)
         .entity(result)
		 .header(HttpHeaders.CONTENT_TYPE, MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_TYPE.withCharset("utf-8"))
         .build());

It is also possible to use ResponseBuilder.header(...) method to set the content type with the charset. See below for a code sample (using JAX-RS 1.1.1, CXF 2.3.1).

final Response myResponse = Response.status(Response.Status.BAD_REQUEST)
    .entity("La requête n'est pas correcte.\n ...")
    .header(HttpHeaders.CONTENT_TYPE, MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN+"; charset=ISO-8859-15" )
    .build();

If you want to do this in a JAX-RS implementation neutral way, you may be able to reset the Content-Type in the MessageBodyWriter. Something like:

public void writeTo(Object obj,
                    Class<?> cls,
                    Type type,
                    Annotation[] annotations,
                    MediaType mt,
                    MultivaluedMap<String, Object> responseHttpHeaders,
                    OutputStream stream) throws IOException {
    responseHttpHeaders.putSingle(javax.ws.rs.core.HttpHeaders.CONTENT_TYPE, mt.toString() + ";charset=UTF-8");
}

If you have different character sets besides UTF-8 per resource method, you may want to create a custom annotation and add it to each resource method. Then, try to use the annotations parameter in the writeTo() method.

Just FYI, Apache Wink supports the usage of charset and other attributes on media types. I hope that future JAX-RS spec revisions makes this easier.

First setup @Produces annotation on your resource class methods.

Then in MessageBodyWriter of your returned type, you can do this in writeTo() method:

response.setContentType(mediaType.toString);

Remark: You can inject response in your writer by:

@Context
protected HttpServletResponse response;

What I do is to get an instance of the servlet response object:

protected @Context HttpServletResponse response;

And then set the character encoding to utf-8:

response.setCharacterEncoding("utf-8");

That works for me.

If using RESTEasy you can register an Inteceptor:

import org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.interception.ServerInterceptor;
import org.jboss.resteasy.core.ResourceMethodInvoker;
import org.jboss.resteasy.core.ServerResponse;
import org.jboss.resteasy.spi.Failure;
import org.jboss.resteasy.spi.HttpRequest;
import org.jboss.resteasy.spi.interception.PreProcessInterceptor;
import org.jboss.resteasy.plugins.providers.multipart.InputPart;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;

import javax.ws.rs.WebApplicationException;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.Provider;

@Provider
@ServerInterceptor
public class ContentTypeSetter implements PreProcessInterceptor {
    @Override
    public ServerResponse preProcess(HttpRequest request, ResourceMethodInvoker resourceMethodInvoker) throws Failure, WebApplicationException {
        request.setAttribute(InputPart.DEFAULT_CONTENT_TYPE_PROPERTY, "*/*; charset=UTF-8");
        return null;
    }
}

Note: If you manually set a @Produces it overrides the ContentType set by this interceptor. If you do that, set the charset in @Produces