Actually I think this is a JBossWS (installer) bug ? The WSDL and Soap headers default to UTF-8, but the characters sent are in the machines java default encoding! I did a "hot fix" to add the system property | "file.encoding=UTF-8" | to the jvm running JBossWS, thus changing the default file !? encoding of the complete jboss installation. Afterwards UTF-8 handling worked as expected (before that jbossws 1.2 used the default file encoding of the installation (was iso latin 1 on my machine) Has anyone found the correct way to configure the file encoding of jbossws 1.2? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4042332#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...