Special characters are garbled on CSV imported objects
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
When importing objects from CSV with special characters like umlauts, these characters are not taken into account, even when CSV file is saved with UTF-8 encoding.
An example CSV file
Kunde,Gültig für Region,Gültig ab,Gültig bi ABC GmbH,A1,12/Nov/21,12/Nov/22
Environment
Editor (for example MS Excel)
Any Insight versions
Diagnosis
By examining the insight_import.log of the time when the import was performed, we can see that the special characters were not recognized from the CSV file.
2021-11-12 14:08:48,889 [insight-InsightImportThreadGroup-worker-thread-1] | header:index: Kunde,G?ltig f?r
Region,G?ltig ab,G?ltig bis
2021-09-28 14:08:48,889 [insight-InsightImportThreadGroup-worker-thread-1] | <<< readDataToTable().The CSV file has a different or invalid file encoding.
$ file -I kunde.csv
kunde.csv: text/plain; charset=unknown-8bitCause
The UTF-8 encoding has not been correctly applied to the CSV file. This happens usually if the file is opened with some editors like MS Excel before uploading to Insight.
To verify the file encoding, you could check the source file in different editors like Sublime or via command line.
$ file -I kunde.csv
kunde.csv: application/csv; charset=utf-8Solution
This comes down to the Editor and its support of UTF-8. Using another text editor and re-saving the file with the right encoding before uploading the file into Insight could fix the issue.
Please see CSV Import for other details when importing Insight objects from CSV.
If you prefer to use only MS Excel, it's recommended to import the CSV file into Excel instead of opening it directly as it is.
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