Special characters/Diacritics are displaying as question marks in my patron records

Symptom

• When importing patron data to WMS, special characters are displaying as question marks.

Applies to

• WMS 
• Tipasa

Resolution

If you are importing data from a student registry system or similar, the input file needs to be in UTF-8 with no byte order mark character.  Anything other than UTF-8 will cause the diacritics to not show properly (Unicode UTF-8 is not the same and does add in a BOM character as well).

There are lots of ways to convert one character set to another.  You might want to talk to your local IT about this.

One way to convert from e.g. UTF-16 or ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 is the Windows (10 or 11) Notepad app.

• Open your file in Notepad
• Select File -> Save As
• At the bottom of the dialog, left to the "Save" button, there is a dropdown for the character encoding. Select "UTF-8" and save the file.

If you require any clarifications contact OCLC Support

Page ID