Special Charaters

In some business use cases, you may have to post special characters, such as ®, to Adobe Experience Manager. Once posted to AEM, you can use special characters to set node properties, as shown in the following illustration.


By default, you cannot post strings to AEM that contain special characters. For example, you cannot run this CURL command to post special characters to AEM.

curl -H "charset=utf-8" -u admin:admin -X POST --data "test=€ , Š , Œ , ™ , š , œ , ž" http://localhost:4502/content/mynodetest

If you attempt this command with CURL, wrong characters are inserted into AEM. That is, you will see: "Ç , è , î , Ö , Ü , £ , P , Ä , " instead of "€ , Š , Œ , ™ , š , œ , ž , Ž , Ÿ".

To successfully post special characters to AEM and use them to set node values in the AEM JCR, you have to create a custom Sling Servlet that is able to handle UTF-8 (UCS Transformation Format—8-bit) encoded strings. This encoding type is a variable-width encoding that represents every character in the Unicode character set.

The Sling Servlet can decode the strings that contain special characters using Java application logic.

String id = java.net.URLDecoder.decode(request.getParameter("id"), "UTF-8");
String firstName = java.net.URLDecoder.decode(request.getParameter("firstName"),"UTF-8");

To post these special characters to the AEM Sling Servlet, encode the strings, as shown in this Java code example.

String val = java.net.URLEncoder.encode("cust®", "UTF-8");
String firstName = java.net.URLEncoder.encode("TOM®", "UTF-8");

To read this development article, click, http://helpx.adobe.com/experience-manager/using/post_chars.html.