Symptoms

The following appears in the atlassian-jira.log while Jira startup and also in ⚙️ → System → System Info page:

sun.jnu.encoding = ANSI_X3.4-1968

This can also cause issues when trying to add attachments with filenames containing special characters (e.g. the German umlaut character). The following error is seen in atlassian-jira.log: 

Got exception while saving attachment in attachment store. Exception: Malformed input or input contains unmappable characters

Diagnosis

Run the command locale in Jira server to find the following result:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Cause

The Platform or JNU encoding in Jira has been set to ANSI_X3.4-1968. This encoding can cause issues in Jira as the encoding supported in Jira is only UTF-8.

Solution

1. In the setenv.sh/bat file:

• Add the following JVM parameter by editing the line below before the export JVM_SUPPORT_RECOMMENDED_ARGS parameter:

JVM_SUPPORT_RECOMMENDED_ARGS="-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -Dsun.jnu.encoding=UTF-8"

  If starting Jira as a Windows service, follow the instructions detailed in https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/setting-properties-and-options-on-startup-938847831.html

• Add the following line to set the LANG environment variable:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

• If using OpenJDK 11, then the following addition might also be required.  Add the following line to setenv.sh/bat:

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

2. Take the following additional steps if you use Redhat or Ubuntu:

• In Redhat 6.x (RPM-Based distributions), set the LANG and LC_ALL values in /etc/sysconfig/i18n as follows:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

• In Redhat 7.x (RPM-Based distributions), run the following command:

sudo localectl set-locale LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

• In Ubuntu (Debian and Debian-based distributions), set the LANG and LC_ALL values in /etc/default/locale as follows:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

• In Oracle Linux 8.x, run the following command:

sudo localectl set-locale en_US.UTF-8 

3. Restart Jira

Alternative Solution

1. If the problem persists after the above steps, consider adding the locale variables directly at the top of the setenv.sh/bat file:

export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

2. Restart Jira

Related articles:

• Troubleshoot character display issues in Jira server