title: request.getCharacterEncoding() returns NULL... why?
body: <p>A coworker of mine created a basic contact-us type form, which is mangling accented characters (è, é, à, etc).  We're using KonaKart a Java e-commerce platform on Struts 1. </p>
  
  <p>I've narrowed the issue down to the data coming in through the HttpServletRequest object.  Comparing a similar (properly functioning) form, I noticed that on the old form the request object's Character Encoding (<code>request.getCharacterEncoding()</code>) is returned as "UTF-8", but on the new form it is coming back as NULL, and the text coming out of <code>request.getParameter()</code> is already mangled. </p>
  
  <p>Aside from that, I haven't found any significant differences between the known-good form, and the new-and-broken form.  </p>
  
  <p>Things I've ruled out:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Both HTML pages have the tag: <code>&lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /&gt;</code></li>
  <li>Both form tags in the HTML use POST, and do not set encodings</li>
  <li>Checking from Firebug, both the Request and Response headers have the same properties</li>
  <li>Both JSP pages use the same attributes in the <code>&lt;%@page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8" language="java" %&gt;</code> tag</li>
  <li>There's nothing remotely interesting going on in the *Form.java files, both inherit from BaseValidatorForm</li>
  <li>I've checked the source file encodings, they're all set to Default - inherited from Container: UTF-8</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>If I convert them from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8, it works great, but I would much rather figure out the core issue. 
  eg: <code>new String(request.getParameter("firstName").getBytes("ISO-8859-1"),"UTF8")</code></p>
  
  <p>Any suggestions are welcome, I'm all out of ideas. </p>