Spring MVC Arabic Language

I am developing a spring mvc application which should support English & Arabic. I've configured the application as mentioned in the spring reference documents and the switching of locale is working perfectly. However the arabic messages in the resource bundle is been shown as junk characters. The encoding is set as UTF-8 and it is working properly. Also I tried running the native2ascii tool for converting the messages_ar.properties file to unicode.

Nothing works. Any help would be much appreciated.

web.xml (partial)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
<web-app version="2.4"...>

<context-param>
    <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
    <param-value>classpath*:META-INF/spring/applicationContext*.xml</param-value>
</context-param>

<filter>
    <filter-name>encodingFilter</filter-name>
    <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>encoding</param-name>
        <param-value>UTF-8</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>forceEncoding</param-name>
        <param-value>true</param-value>
    </init-param>
</filter>

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>encodingFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

<listener>
    <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
</listener>

<!-- Handles all requests into the application -->
<servlet>
    <servlet-name>Spring MVC Dispatcher Servlet</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
        <param-value>
            /WEB-INF/spring/mvc-config.xml
        </param-value>
    </init-param>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

mvc-config.xml (partial)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>

<context:component-scan base-package="net.omnsoq.classified.controller" use-default-filters="false">
    <context:include-filter expression="org.springframework.stereotype.Controller" type="annotation" />
</context:component-scan>

<!-- Configures support for @Controllers -->
<mvc:annotation-driven />

<!-- Resolves view names to protected .jsp resources within the /WEB-INF/views directory -->
<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
    <property name="viewClass" value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.JstlView" />
    <property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/views/" />
    <property name="suffix" value=".jsp" />
</bean>

<bean class="org.springframework.context.support.ReloadableResourceBundleMessageSource" id="messageSource"
    p:basenames="WEB-INF/i18n/messages,WEB-INF/i18n/application" p:fallbackToSystemLocale="false" />

<!-- store preferred language configuration in a cookie -->
<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.i18n.CookieLocaleResolver" id="localeResolver" p:cookieName="locale" />


<mvc:interceptors>
    <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.i18n.LocaleChangeInterceptor" p:paramName="lang" />
</mvc:interceptors>

jsp code

<%@ taglib uri="http://www.springframework.org/tags" prefix="spring" %>
...
<%@page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8" %>
...
<spring:message code="nav.label.myaccount" />

I found the solution. So I just want to share it so that it might be helpful to someone else.

I set the fileEncodings and defaultEncoding properties to UTF-8 for the messageSource.

<bean class="org.springframework.context.support.ReloadableResourceBundleMessageSource" id="messageSource"
    p:basenames="WEB-INF/i18n/messages,WEB-INF/i18n/application" p:fallbackToSystemLocale="false" p:fileEncodings="UTF-8"
    p:defaultEncoding="UTF-8" />

Did you check the contents of the resource file? It should not contain any UTF-8 characters, only ASCII.

For that use:

<native2ascii encoding="UTF-8" src="${src.file}" dest="${conf.deploy.dir}" includes="**/messages.properties"/>