The Oracle B2C Service product stores all data in UTF-8 format, and Oracle B2C Service customization and integration APIs expect this format. This includes Customer Portal and means that integrations (creating public API requests) and customizations will require programmatic character encoding conversion in some cases.

 

In contrast, the handling of email supports all major encoding charsets, in that characters are converted (or rather attempted to be) to UTF-8 encoding before they are inserted to the Oracle B2C Service database. For details on this see

 

 

Another consideration is specific to product features that use HTML, as there are HTML entity representations of many characters that cannot be converted to UTF-8. This includes incident threads and answer content, and is a way to use non UTF-8 characters with the Oracle B2C Service product. For details on this see

 

 

Beyond this, the copy and paste of characters into console and Customer Portal text fields can show '?' characters in the saved data. The same can happen when unsupported characters are sent in email as well.

 

This will happen with some characters when the product is unable to successfully convert a particular character to UTF-8 before saving it to the database. This is known to happen with some emoji characters, for example. For details on this see