Bug 62788

This is inspired by a StackOverflow question [1].

While most of Tomcat 8.5/9.0 uses UTF-8 by default, the default configuration of (Async)FileHandlers in logging.properties is to use the system default character set.

1. There is no configuration for the "encoding" property of those FileHandlers in the default 'logging.properties' file.

2. The default value for that property is to use the system default character set. As documented in javadoc [2].


I find this odd.

My proposal is to add explicit configuration for the 'encoding' property of AsyncFileHandlers in Tomcat 9.0.x onwards to be 'UTF-8':

1catalina.org.apache.juli.AsyncFileHandler.encoding = UTF-8

etc.


I think that for a ConsoleHandler [3] it is expected to use the system encoding. It is used for monitoring at development time, and should not be used on a production system.

I think that a file written by a FileHandler is expected to preserve all information written to it, and UTF-8 suits better for this purpose.


[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52591511/how-to-set-character-encoding-to-servletcontext-logs-in-tomcat

[2] http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-9.0-doc/api/org/apache/juli/FileHandler.html

[3] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/logging/ConsoleHandler.html