Month abbreviations in Jira dates incorrectly end with a dot, period, full stop or decimal point when the locale is set to en-AU

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

Summary

Month abbreviations in Jira dates are displayed with a trailing extra dot, period, full stop or decimal point (i.e. ".") when the locale is set to Australian English (en-AU):

"Apr," "Jun," and "Aug" are all followed by "." characters before the date separator.

In the above example, "Apr," "Jun," and "Aug" are all followed by "." characters before the date separator.

Environment

Any Jira version on any operating system, using Java 11 and with the locale set to English (Australia) / en-AU.

Diagnosis

View the System info page in Jira (Administration>System > System support > System Info) and confirm that:

  • JVM Version is 11

  • User Locale is English (Australia)

Cause

The underlying cause is a Java bug affecting Java 11 when using the en-AU locale:

JDK-8208487: Australian locale month names contain spurious dot at the end

This bug was introduced in Java 9, when Java began using theUnicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR)for internationalisation. The version of the CLDR dataset bundled with Java contained a bug (CLDR-11096) affecting the en-AU locale.

Note that Jira versions which support Java 11 (8.2.0 and higher) already include the workaround for this bug in their default configurations; see Java 11 and Jira platform upgrade for more details. However, Jira instances upgraded from versions prior to 8.2.0 may have carried over their older Jira configurations which do not contain the workaround.

Solution

The solution for this issue is to instruct Jira to fall back on the older Java 8 compatibility mode for locales.

To do this, add the following Java parameter to Jira's startup options as per Setting properties and options on startup:

1 -Djava.locale.providers=COMPAT

For example:

# Prevents the JVM from suppressing stack traces if a given type of exception # occurs frequently, which could make it harder for support to diagnose a problem.

JVM_EXTRA_ARGS="-XX:-OmitStackTraceInFastThrow -Djava. locale.providers=COMPAT"

Updated on March 14, 2025
Platform
Data Center only
Product
Jira Software Data Center
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