How to force javax xslt transformer to encode national characters using utf-8 and not html entities?

Question

I'm working on filter that should transform an output with some stylesheet. Important sections of code looks like this:

PrintWriter out = response.getWriter();
...
StringReader sr = new StringReader(content);
Source xmlSource = new StreamSource(sr, requestSystemId);
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.ENCODING, "UTF-8");
transformer.setParameter("encoding", "UTF-8");
//same result when using ByteArrayOutputStream xo = new java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream();
StringWriter xo = new StringWriter();
StreamResult result = new StreamResult(xo);
transformer.transform(xmlSource, result);
out.write(xo.toString());

The problem is that national characters are encoded as html entities and not by using UTF. Is there any way to force transformer to use UTF-8 instead of entities?

Answer 1

You need to set the output method to text instead of (default) xml.

transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.METHOD, "text");

You should however also set the response encoding beforehand:

response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");

And instruct the webbrowser to use the same encoding:

response.setContentType("text/html;charset=UTF-8");