Tomcat and weird chars

Just stumbled on something irritating. When setting up a Tomcat on a Mac for local development and you wish to turn on security to the management HTML console, you are instructed to add a <role> and a <user> to Tomcat’s tomcat-users.xml file, like this:

<role rolename="admin" />
<role rolename="manager" />
<role rolename="manager-gui" />
<user username="admin" password="admin" roles="admin,manager,manager-gui" />

However, the Tomcat I had installed (7.0.29) included a tomcat-users.xml with some of these lines commented out, but with one small difference: The quotation marks were not real quotation marks.

I don’t know what unicode char it was but could not get the security to function at all until I manually replaced all “-chars. Then finally it.

(Originally published 2012–11–16)