RE and co tried following the procedures outlined in my previous post yesterday, to enable Apache to talk to Tomcat over UTF-8, but the final stage in the Apache config screwed up all our virtual host mappings, so that's no good. I went back and looked at the problem again, and determined that the only issue remaining was the quicksearch feature on the Mariage site, and this was because it used a straightforward form submission. I ended up coding a workaround. What I do is to use a JavaScript function instead of a straight form submission. The JS constructs a URL, which is then encoded with encodeURIComponent (this hexes the UTF-8 octets); then as the search page loads, more JS parses the search string and decodes the results back to UTF-8, which it can then submit to the regular search.

This seems to be working, so we'll stick with it for the moment. If any more problems show up with sites proxied through Apache, we might have to revisit this, but I'm not inclined to take risks with the virtual host sites; they're our most public and important, in some cases.