How do i resolve encoding errors during an import from TRAC

Question

Hi all,

Could someone guide me with this please.

I would like to import all TRAC tickets to JIRA. For which I used External system import and  tried importing zip folder of my project. The import was successful but the TRAC tickets also contain french characters which are not encoded properly.

I am using TRAC 1.0.2 and SQLite db.

Any help is much appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

SF

Andy Heinzer · Accepted Answer

Hi,

This is a problem we have seen before with the import process in Jira.  There was a bug report for this in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-35589

By default, we typically recommend using UTF-8 character encoding everywhere within Jira. I would recommend trying first to follow the steps in JIRA Application internationalisation and encoding troubleshooting.  It is important to set all encoding aspects in Jira to use UTF-8.

Try these steps first, and then see if you can repeat this TRAC import to see if this helps.

If you are still having the same problem after trying these steps, then it might recommend looking into this related thread:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Special-french-characters-import-through-CSV/qaq-p/338423

Rahul on that thread reported that he could use the ISO-8859-1 encoding when you perform this CSV import as a means to correctly import these French characters into Jira.  When using the CSV import, there is an option as to what format the file is in when you import it.

The problem with this solution is that the TRAC import does not have the exact same options as the CSV import does.  As such you can't just specify the encoding at the time of import.  In which case I would be interested to see if you change the encoding of Jira itself to use this ISO-8859-1 just long enough to perform this import.