Recently we had the following issue with a web application. The form submission of text area containg the ampersand (&) character was not correctly transfered to the web application.

The web application was receiving the request with more parameter than expected. In fact the ampersand in the textarea field content was acting as a separator. When point directly to the machine (with http://:8080), everything was working properly. So the problem was not Tomcat.

After some research, I decided to comment the usage of mod_encoding in httpd.conf and …. it worked.

In fact, by default the mod_encoding was applied to all request, although it is only needed for the webdav directories.

My conclusion

Automate installation is nice but has some limitation