Campaign: incorrect special characters when UTF-8 Charset not declared in SOAP payload
In Adobe Campaign transactional message workflows that ingest SOAP event payloads, special characters such as ®, ©, ™, or curly apostrophes may render incorrectly in the stored event data, preview, subject line, or delivered email. This behavior is typically caused by requests being sent without an explicit UTF-8 charset declaration, which can lead to implicit server-side encoding interpretation.
Description description
A transactional delivery was reported where special characters appeared malformed after the event was ingested and rendered. The issue was visible in event preview and in the final delivered email.
Examples of affected characters included:
- ® rendering as malformed text such as ®
- Other UTF-8 symbols and punctuation displaying incorrectly in the subject or body
- Initial investigation confirmed that the payload itself contained valid UTF-8 bytes. This indicated that the corruption was not necessarily introduced in the source content, but could occur during SOAP request ingestion when the request encoding was not explicitly declared.
Further testing showed:
- Requests sent without an explicit UTF-8 charset in the Content-Type header could reproduce the issue
- Requests sent with charset=UTF-8 rendered the same characters correctly
- The behavior was reproducible outside a single environment, which suggested this was not a customer-specific template problem
- Test tooling differences mattered, because some tools automatically enforce UTF-8 and can hide the issue during validation
Resolution resolution
Ensure that the SOAP request explicitly declares UTF-8 encoding.
Use the following header:
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8
It is also recommended to include the XML declaration at the top of the SOAP body:
< ?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8”?>
Result
After explicitly declaring UTF-8 in the request, special characters rendered correctly in testing.