Non-ASCII characters (sometimes) show as ?

Question

Hello. We have an issue where on some pages non-ascii characters show as "?".

It seems to mostly happen on urls that include "/pages". If I edit any of these pages, the characters shows correctly.

When it breaks, it breaks it on every element on the page. For example, if I hover over the top right icon to show my name, it will also be broken on broken pages (it includes one of these characters), while it will be fine on pages that are not broken.

We have tried running the encoding test, and it has no problems

<confluenceurl>/admin/encodingtestrun.action

We initially set up confluence on MSSQL, after which we changed to Postgresql. We exported all the data to xml and reinstalled the confluence server with the new database server and reimported. It may seem that the problems happened after this.

Postgresql should be correctly configured:

confluence=# show LC_CTYPE;
lc_ctype
-------------
en_US.UTF-8
(1 row)

confluence=# show LC_COLLATE;
lc_collate
-------------
en_US.UTF-8
(1 row)

I looked around some of the tables to see how it looks like in the database, and it seems to be all good there.

Christopher Berg Schwanstrøm · Accepted Answer

We fixed this by changing the java startup configuration, adding these options.

-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
-Dsun.jnu.encoding=UTF-8

We tried adding them to bin\setenv.bat, but it did not seem to be picked up.

Instead, we used the tomcat settings editor (The argument here is based on the Windows Service name)

C:\Program Files\Atlassian\Confluence\bin	omcat9w.exe //ES//Confluence270319085364

And adding those two options under Java options.

After saving and restarting all characters are rendering properly.