Platform notice: Server and Data Center only. This article only applies to Atlassian products on the server and data center platforms.

Symptoms

Non-English characters typed into JIRA are displayed as question marks, e.g. umlauts ( ä ) or Asian characters ( 要 ).

Cause

Character encoding used by one of the JIRA components is set to use encoding that doesn't support given characters.

Resolution

1. Change encoding to -Dfile.encoding=utf-8 to your application startup parameters. See Setting Properties and Options on Startup.
2. If the database was not created with the utf8 charset:
   1. Append to URL &useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF8 to the database URL in <jira-install>/conf/server.xml.
   2. Recreate a new database with correct encoding CREATE DATABASE jiratest CHARACTER SET utf8;
   3. Point server.xml's database configuration to the new database
   4. Create an XML backup
   5. Restart JIRA
   6. Import the XML backup into your new database