Problem with umlaut characters when importing issues from Mantis using JIRA Importer Plugin
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
Problem
When issues with umlaut characters are imported from Mantis, JIRA replaces the characters with random character as shown below:
Diagnosis
Diagnostic Steps
Verify whether both Mantis and JIRA is using UTF-8 encoding.
This problem could also be specific to MS SQL
Cause
The origin of the encoding problem is Mantis. The Microsoft SQL database supports UCS-2 and does just fine. Mantis however unnecessarily encodes the characters using UTF-8 again. Hence, the database contains another level of character encoding neither the database nor the JIRA importer is aware of.
Solution
Workaround
Remove this additional encoding level by decoding all the texts in the database before the import using the JIRA importer.
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