Invisible character causing error logs on jira

Question

Hi All

On our JIRA logs we see that this error has appeared thousands of time this morning. On investigating, i was able to identify that this was caused due to a special character in one of the issues on JIRA

This special character is not visible in here, but if you copy paste this line below onto a notepad you will see what i mean.

In fact, if you try to use backspace on the words varls you will see that the backspace button acknowledges presence of a character (which of course does not appear here nor on the jira description but does appear on notepad)

/varls

(Try backspacing the above word and you will see there are invisible characters between the R and the L; copy it on notepad and you will see those invisible characters)

How can we ensure this invisible characters does not cause error logs on jira?

Rahul

Tiago Comasseto · Accepted Answer

Hi Rahul, in most cases issues related to special characters are associated to the database collation. You may want to check whether you're using the suggested collation to your JIRA database (reference). Additionally, in case you're using MySQL, there's a known issue with 4 byte characters in MySQL, you can see more details here.

I hope it helps.

Cheers