Problem with umlaut characters when importing issues from Mantis using JIRA Importer Plugin
Platform notice: Server and Data Center only. This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Server and Data Center platforms.
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
Problem
When issues with umlaut characters are imported from Mantis, JIRA replaces the characters with random character as shown below:
Diagnosis
Diagnostic Steps
- Verify whether both Mantis and JIRA is using UTF-8 encoding.
- This problem could also be specific to MS SQL
Cause
The origin of the encoding problem is Mantis. The Microsoft SQL database supports UCS-2 and does just fine. Mantis however unnecessarily encodes the characters using UTF-8 again. Hence, the database contains another level of character encoding neither the database nor the JIRA importer is aware of.
Workaround
Remove this additional encoding level by decoding all the texts in the database before the import using the JIRA importer.