I have a method annotated with @ResponseBody and returning a string. The String contains Unicode characters, but when my browser renders my the response, all I see are ?? in place of the Unicode characters. I've also tried using a CharacterEncodingFilter and setting the encoding to UTF-8 and force encoding to true. This hasn't worked for the HTTP response either.

Is there a way to let Spring know the returned content encoding is UTF-8? The only other way I see is not use Spring and write the content directly to the HttpServletResponse.

Thanks.