Messages With Inverted Question Marks In Place Of Special Characters (Doc ID 2352195.1)

Last updated on JANUARY 26, 2024

Applies to:

Symptoms

In our Messages Catalog, some specific characters are replaced by inverted question marks.

Things like bullet points, single & double quotation marks are affected, among others. It's not consistent or common, but it is present. It appears in both delivered & custom tables as an upside-down question mark. It has been around for some time, but we've also seen it within PUM images before import, notably the PUM 21 image:
SELECT * FROM PSMSGCATDEFN WHERE (MESSAGE_TEXT LIKE '%¿%' OR DESCRLONG LIKE '%¿%');

Here are two examples from the PUM image:
MESSAGE_SET_NBR = 18220, MESSAGE_NBR = 1216
MESSAGE_SET_NBR = 17235, MESSAGE_NBR = 320

We are non-unicode; character set on all our databases is WE8ISO8859P15.

What we need are two solutions:
1. The correct method (settings, configurations, PUM download steps, whatever) to stop this damage from happening on further imports from PUM images.
2. A cleanup method to fix what has already been corrupted.

Changes

Cause

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