utf8 url encoding not supported by deffault in jdk's older than 1.4

[asfimport]

Marouane Bouzoubaa (Bug 8961):
I was trying to use jmeter to test our new Arabic web search engine, but things
were not working well until I found out that the arabic "arguments" that are in
utf8 were not encoded correctly. the URLEncoder/URLDecoder (in jdk's older than
1.4) use the default system encoding. jdk1.4 supports new versions of this
methods that take two parameters: String to be encoded and the encoding to use
for encoding.
I just didn't have time to figure out which source file to edit to make the
needed changes.

Severity: normal
OS: All

[asfimport]

Mike Stover (migrated from Bugzilla):
I don't know what to do with this one. I would think JMeter should use the
local encoding. You are putting in utf-8 codes to simulate Arabic characters
because you are on a non-arabic machine? If JMeter used utf-8 rather than the
local encoding, wouldn't that also create problems for some people? The only
other option is to give people a choice of encodings in the GUI...

I'm just not sure how to resolve your problem that will also work for everyone
else.

[asfimport]

rOnn (migrated from Bugzilla):
This comments may or may not be applicable since this bug is already several
months old.

I've run in to this problem with my application in the past. The way i got
around the problem is to set file.encoding system property to ISO8859_1
(because jdk makes that assumption).

[asfimport]

Jordi Salvat i Alabart (migrated from Bugzilla):
Can someone be more specific on what this bug is about?

Provide a way to reproduce it, explain what the expected results are, and where
actual results deviate from them?

I'll currently reduce severity from Blocker to Normal (can't be a blocker if
it's been open for so long!), and I'll close as INVALID if we don't get more
info in a week or so. (Of course it can always be reopened).

[asfimport]

Oliver Rossmueller (migrated from Bugzilla):
If you have a web app which expects the client requests to be in a specific
character encoding (e.g. it is an arabic web site and the servlet expects the
requests to be utf-8) you need a way to tell JMeter which encoding to use to
simulate clients using that encoding.

The solution would be to provide a way to set the character encoding to be used
by an http request (text field or combo box for example). But this would also
require a full switch to J2SE 1.4, because there is no way to set the character
set for url encoding in earlier java releases.

[asfimport]

Matthew Faull (migrated from Bugzilla):
I'm using JMeter against a utf-8 website with alot of Japanese content. Using
the latest tar ball (20/05/2003) this doesn't work. The posted values aren't
encoded correctly. Thus I've temporarily altered the following file(in my
source) until I can find or do a more complete solution:
"org.apache.jmeter.protocol.http.util.EncoderCache.java"
I changed:
encodedValue = URLEncoder.encode(k);

To:
try{
encodedValue = URLEncoder.encode(k, "utf8");
}
catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e)
{
System.out.println("Don't support utf8 encoding??");
e.printStackTrace();
}

Yes - I know my exception handling here is bad :-p