Characters Not Supported by ASCII are Being Displayed as Question Marks

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-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

Updated on April 10, 2025
Platform
Data Center only
Product
Jira Software Data Center
On this pageSymptomsCauseResolution

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