Japanese characters in page titles appear as '?'

[Jeffrey Harris]

I am importing localized documentation into Confluence, which seems to have some trouble displaying the Japanese kanji (double-byte characters), particularly in Page Titles, links, and the ToC. Rather than displaying the correct characters, I see a string of question marks "?????".

I also get messages about duplicate page titles when I know they are not. And while all of this happens, the page content seems to display just fine.

Any ideas why this would happen?

Note, I'm not a Japanese speaker, just trying to get content into the Wiki so our Japanese translator can take over.

[Jeremy Largman · Accepted solution]

It sounds like you have an encoding problem. Check Troubleshooting Character Encodings. Often it's the database - that's the most likely.

[Jeffrey Harris]

In my case, Jeremy is exactly correct.

When we installed Confluence, somehow the database was set to "Latin-1" character encoding. Not good for displaying double-byte characters. Once we changed the database encoding to UTF-8, and confirmed that both the App Server and Confluence application were also set to UTF-8, then things started working famously.

I haven't had any trouble with Japanese character display since.

[David Dube]

Did you just follow this procedure, or is there an easier way?

Did you lose any content? Of the content that was already saved (using Japanese characters)... was the content retained or did you have to re-copy/add the content?

Dave

[Jeffrey Harris]

We followed that procedure. Resetting the database encoding was a bit of a pain, but it was necessary to get things working.

[David Dube]

Hi Timplooker,

I'm having the same issue... were you able to resolve this on your end? I was able to find a language pack, but it's reportedly only compatible with v3.2 - v3.2.1, and I'm running with 3.4.1.

Dave