Problem

Often users may have problems with certain characters in an instance. Symptoms may include:

• Non-ASCII characters appearing as question marks (?)
• Page links with non-ASCII characters not working
• Single characters being displayed as two characters
• Garbled text appearing

Resolution

Atlassian recommends UTF-8 or Unicode encoding, and case-insensitive collation. In most cases, problems are due to a misconfiguration in one of the components.

Ensure the same encoding is used across all components

The UTF-8 character encoding should be used across the database, application server and web application.

• In the system information of the Jira application, ensure that the webwork.i18n.encoding is set to UTF-8. See Accented characters not displaying correctly in Jira server .
• To change the character encoding used in the application server, please ensure you set the Application Server URL encoding, and view your application server's documentation on any other settings required to enable your encoding. You may need to consult Integrating Jira with Apache or Integrating Jira applications with IIS, if using those.
• To change the character encoding used in the database, see the appropriate child page from Connecting JIRA applications to a database.
• Start Jira with the parameters -Dfile.encoding=utf-8 and -Dsun.jnu.encoding=UTF-8. See Setting properties and options on startup.
   For running Jira as a Service in Windows, add one parameter per line.

Requesting support

If there are still problems with character encoding after following the above steps, create a support request, and our support staff will aid in solving your problem.

Entering in the following details will help us to identify your problem:

• Attach screenshots of the problem.
• Generate a Support Zip and attach it to the ticket.
• Copy the contents of the System Information page into the 'Description' field.