Strange Characters in the Author Column for Commits History
Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.
Note that this KB was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center KBs 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
Non-Ascii characters, like é, â, è are not being displayed correctly in the repository commit history, column Author. These characters are not displayed correctly only in the Author field. Usage of the same character in the commit message displays correctly.
Bitbucket Server and browser are both set to use UTF-8 encoding.
Cause
This behaviour is related to Git itself. Bitbucket Server uses the same String encodings, in the server code, where it's loading the commit message as where it's loading the author name, indicating this is related to how Git is interpreting those characters, since they are correctly displayed in one place and not in another.
Further Troubleshooting
For further investigation, it would help to have one of the users whose name shows up wrong in the author column make a commit to a test/demo repository and check if the problem can be replicated?
Resolution
Check how this Git repository was created? Was it migrated from another SCM - svn for example? The problem lies with how this migration came about and what tool was used.
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