Umlauts Display Incorrectly in PowerShell Job Output

Products

• CA Automic Workload Automation - Automation Engine

Issue/Introduction

When using the PowerShell external interpreter within an Automic job, characters with umlauts (e.g., ä, ö, ü) or other special characters in the script's output are displayed as garbled or incorrect characters (e.g., ?? or similar) in the Automic job report.

:BEGIN_EXT_INT POWERSHELL

Write-Host Grüßen

:END_EXT_INT POWERSHELL

Output:

Gr??Yen

Environment

Product: CA Automic Workload Automation - Automation Engine
Component: Windows Agent (PowerShell External Interpreter)
OS: Microsoft Windows Server

Cause

This issue typically arises from a character encoding mismatch. The Windows operating system's default locale settings for non-Unicode programs may not be configured to use UTF-8. Consequently, PowerShell output containing special characters is not correctly encoded for the display or logging environment, leading to garbled text.

Resolution

To ensure proper display of umlauts and special characters, enable the system-wide Unicode UTF-8 beta feature in Windows.

Steps:

1. On the Windows machine running the Automic Agent, open Windows Settings.
2. Navigate to Time & language > Language & region.
3. Scroll down and click on Administrative language settings.
4. In the "Region" dialog box, under the "Language for non-Unicode programs" section, click Change system locale….
5. Check the box next to Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support.
6. Click OK and restart the Windows system when prompted.

Additional Information

• This setting affects how all non-Unicode programs on the system handle character encoding.
• After the system restart, run the PowerShell job again to verify that umlauts and special characters are now displayed correctly in the Automic job report.