Seeing Inverted Question Marks with Oracle
Platform Notice: Data Center - This article applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.
Note that this knowledge base article was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center knowledge base articles for non-Data Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.
*Except Fisheye and Crucible
Symptoms
Random inverted question marks appear replacing quotation marks/hyphens copied from a Microsoft Windows document. For example:
Jeremy¿s going to buy me a surprise gift and I¿m going to act surprised.- Using Oracle with non UTF8 encoding, eg.
WE8ISO8859P1 ISO 8859-1 West European - No error recorded in the log file
Diagnosis
Failed the Database Round-trip test in the Database Encoding test. Also you can execute this query to check which is the current database character set:
select value from nls_database_parameters where parameter='NLS_CHARACTERSET';Cause
Some of the characters used by Windows are not covered by the database encoding (eg. WE8ISO8859P1).
Resolution
Switch to an Oracle encoding that supports Windows characters. eg. AL32UTF8 (Confluence 5.5 or later versions) or WE8MSWIN1252 (Confluence 5.4 or earlier versions).