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How to render or pre-render special characters in a Unix or Linux environment

Applies to

HCL Digital Experience v9.5 and higher

Introduction

The default character encoding for rich text and text elements in Web Content Manager (WCM) is UTF-8, whereas most Unix or Linux operating systems use ISO-8859-1. This discrepancy can cause issues when rendering or pre-rendering special characters on non-Windows systems. This article describes how to resolve character encoding issues when rendering or pre-rendering special characters in Unix or Linux environments.

Instructions

To resolve character encoding issues when rendering or pre-rendering special characters, perform one of the following options:

Converting pre-rendered files using iconv

Keep the operating system character encoding set to ISO-8859-1 and use a conversion utility such as iconv to convert pre-rendered files from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1.

Run the following command:

iconv --from-code=UTF-8 --to-code=ISO-8859-1 ./oldfile.htm ./newfile.html

Changing the default WCM encoding

Change the default character encoding used by WCM to ISO-8859-1.

  1. Open the IBM Integrated Solutions Console (WAS admin console) in a web browser.
  2. Navigate to Resources > Resource Environment > Resource Environment Providers > WCM WCMConfigService > Custom properties.

  3. Locate the connect.defaultencoding property.

    • If the property is present, set its value to ISO-8859-1:

      1. Select the connect.defaultencoding property.
      2. Set its Value to ISO-8859-1.
      3. Select Apply.
      4. Select Save at the top of the console messages.

    • If the property is not present, create it and set its value to ISO-8859-1.

      1. Select New....
      2. Enter the following details:
        1. Name: connect.defaultencoding
        2. Value: ISO-8859-1
      3. Select Apply.
      4. Select Save at the top of the console messages.

  4. Restart the HCL Digital Experience (DX) server.

    Note

    Changing this setting modifies the character set of all content delivered through the WCM connect servlet.

Changing your operating system encoding

Change the default character encoding of your Unix or Linux operating system to UTF-8.