Servlet is unable to interpret href url for ressources with accents or other non US-ASCII filename it has send itself. whole url decoding process is broken under a slide+tomcat (did not check with other containers) However, typing accentuated characters on the url bar directly does allow access to the ressource, because client send an uri with a different url encoding which does not mess (the same format it uses for a put). Tested with: novell webdav client windows 2000 web folders DAVExplorer kio:webdav Analysis: The value received by req.getPathInfo() in WebdavUtils.getRelativePath() is already broken as container already intrepreted this as a 'classical' urlencode. What i mean is value of req.getPathInfo() has all %hh converted to exactly one character while this was encoded supposing it were utf-8 2 byte characters. So instead of téèst i get téèst. There seems to be a method named fixTomcatURL() but which does exactly the opposite of it job. At the output of this 'fix' the uri is converted to téèst. As you may guess slide has lost of difficulties to understand this :) This is a big problem as it renders public acces to a slide webdav folder useless. If someone puts a ressource with a non us-ascii character, this make this ressource unmodifiable! Suggestion: Stick to classical url encoding, let container manage the uri, they do that quite well using the HttpServletResponse.encodeURL() !! Trying to by pass container in url encoding/decoding can only lead to such problems and weirdness.