How to fix DSpace oai not showing special characters?

Question

My DSpace install is working fine, the metadata is being stored and showed correctly in any browser. The database has been confirmed as UTF-8. The problem is that the oai protocol shows accents and diacritics in letters (áéíóúüUñÑ etc) as ? like Dise?o instead of Diseño and all the entities that harvest our metadata report this problem. If you would like to see for yourselves, this is the link: http://repositorio.puce.edu.ec/oai/request?verb=Identify

I can't find any file that sets the encoding for the oai protocol nor any kind of solution for this problem.

Answer 1

Based on this thread: http://dspace.2283337.n4.nabble.com/OAI-tp4681419.html, you have to set -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 in JAVA_OPTS. Then do a clean and force a rebuild of your OAI index as @terrywb mentioned (ie bin/dspace oai clean-cache and bin/dspace oai import -c -o.

Answer 2

When you run bin/dspace oai import -c make sure you are running it with UTF-8 locale. For example use LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8. It's mentioned in the documentation and also filed as an issue https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/DS-2033

Answer 3

Have yow set the URIencoding into tomcat's server.xml?

<Connector connectionTimeout="20000" port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1"
            redirectPort="8443" URIEncoding="UTF-8" />