how to use org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter to correct character encoding?

I need some help.

I placed the code snippet below in my web.xml.

<filter>
    <filter-name>encodingFilter</filter-name>
    <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter </filter-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>encoding</param-name>
        <param-value>UTF-8</param-value>
    </init-param>
</filter>

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>encodingFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

and in my server.xml:

<Connector connectionTimeout="20000" port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" redirectPort="8443" URIEncoding="UTF-8"/>

My jsp pages are encoded as UTF-8 and my mysql table is encoded as utf8_general_ci.

My problem is that whenever I save a ñ it becomes ?.

When I tried to manually save ñ in the mysql terminal its saving properly. I suspect the problem lies within my server or my program. Please help.