Conversion of UTF-8 form fields in Multi Part Form

Got to say a big thanks to Abhishek at Running Commentary for the solution to this problem.

While using the Apache Commons File Upload Library on a Spanish Language form, I was having problems with the UTF-8 characters that were being submitted in people's names etc. Everything else was working properly, the rest of the Spanish characters on the page were displaying properly but the input was being translated into garbage when submitted.

The solution ultimately was to change

item.getString()

to

item.getString("UTF-8").trim()

While extracting the items from the List element that the FileUploadHandler returned after parsing the request object.

Bear in mind, it doesn't matter what you do before calling this, if you don't explicitely tell the FUH what encoding you want to you use, you'll always get standard ASCII back (and subsequently garbage if your form fields contain anything other than standard ASCII...

Hope this helps.

How to change the default JRE in Mac OS X (Leopard)

The problem was, my Eclipse installation was setup to use JRE 1.6 but when I checked using

mvn --version

it reported that it was using JRE 1.5. The solution's pretty simple in fact. The versions of Java JRE that are installed on your Mac are located in

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions

If you list the contents of the folder in terminal using

ls -al

then you'll see a symbolic link called "CurrentJDK" pointing to a symbolic link called "1.5" pointing to the latest version of 1.5 installed. Delete this link and recreate it pointing it to the symbolic link called "1.6" and you're done. The following code will achieve this.

 cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framwork/Versions/
sudo rm -r CurrentJDK
sudo ln -s 1.6 CurrentJDK

UPDATE Due to obvious confusion caused by my $ sign, I have reworked the code snippets to make them clearer

Learning Java now :)

So, the company where I am working at the moment has made the move into a Java based web environment. Lots of reasons and I'm not going into them here as this is a personal blog (despite the technical nature) and I'm not going to discuss work decisions or anything that may be confidential in nature of course.

But - I have a blog, I'm learning a lot of new stuff and it makes sense to switch the focus of the blog to whatever I'm using/doing/learning rather than a single focus on Symfony as I originally planned.

So watch out for a lot of new posts as I go... most of what I learn will posted here for my future reference