Hello I'm building a Spring MVC web application that runs on Tomcat 6.0.20 and JDK 1.6.0_19. When I send some special characters through an HTML form some of them are stored as question marks ?

For example these symbols are stored correctly: €, á, é, í, ‰, etc But some symbols are replaced with ? like: £, ?, ?

MySQL tables charset is utf-8. My jsp also use utf-8

<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" pageEncoding="UTF-8" %>

I have included org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter in web.xml as suggested here

When I debug the POST request when sending 3 characters €a£ with firebug I get: %E2%82%ACa%E2%82%A4 which is correct since E2 82 AC is the code for € and E2 82 A4 is the code for £ but £ is stored as ? in the database. When I save £ directly into the database it is displayed correctly in the webpage.

How can I fix this?