UTF-8 encoding issue in spring MVC Ajax

Recently I needed to work with a spring mvc project, with non-english characters (malayalam characters for eg.) The MySQL database table was indeed utf-8 by default and we can directly enter the non-english characters in there easily. The problem being the response from the controller was being shown as a string of characters like ???.

So begins with this Stack Overflow answer, there was a blog page which offered three solutions. However the hosting was down, have to access it via wayback machine. I’m posting the first solution here, because many replied that’s the solution that worked for them.

Solution 1: Don’t use @ResponseBody. Return void in the controller, and use HtppServletResponse to return string with valid formatting.

here’s my code

@RequestMapping("getRandomArticle")
public void getRandomArticle(
	HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException {

	response.addHeader("Content-Type", "text/html;charset=UTF-8");
	response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
	
	List stuffs = dao.getRandomData();
	
	ServletOutputStream responseClient = response.getOutputStream();
	
	String jsonString = new Gson().toJson(stuffs.get(0));
	byte[] utf8JsonString = jsonString.getBytes("UTF-8");
	responseClient.write(utf8JsonString);
	responseClient.close();
}

I hope this is helpful for someone out there :)