language character-set utf-8

The default encoding format is GBK.

Usage Scenarios

The default system encoding format of the FW is GBK. In this format, users can enter only characters (Chinese and English characters) in the GBK encode table when configuring parameters such as policies names and user names on the FW. The characters of other languages (such as German and French) are not supported. When the FW interconnects with a third-party system, for example, an authentication server on which user names contain non-GBK characters, the user names cannot be imported to the FW, and the users cannot log in to the FW. If non-GBK characters (such as German or French) need to be used, you can run the language character-set utf-8 command on the FW to switch the encoding format to UTF-8.

Prerequisites

This command is available only when the current language mode (language-mode) is English.

Precautions

• If only GBK-supported characters are used, do not switch the encoding format. Especially in the Chinese environment, once the encoding format is switched, the Chinese web UI and CLI are unavailable.

• If the UTF-8 format is required, you are strongly recommended to switch the default format to UTF-8 before configuring any services. Otherwise, some configurations may not be automatically transcoded. In addition, if the device has user authentication-related or SSL VPN configurations, the device will be restarted during transcoding, interrupting services.
• You cannot switch the UTF-8 encoding format back to GBK.
• Before switching to UTF-8, you can enter only GBK characters on the web UI. For the CLI, administrators can set multiple encoding formats in the terminal software, and the configurations are stored on the device in the corresponding encoding formats. For existing configurations, the FW supports transcoding only from GBK to UTF-8.
• To ensure non-stop services, in hot standby networking, perform transcoding on the standby device first, manually switch the active and standby devices, and perform transcoding on the original active device (the transcoding command does not apply to hot standby). The procedures for the active/standby and load balancing networking modes are different. For details, see the chapter about how to configure system character encoding in Configuration Guide.
• For the execution of the language character-set utf-8 command, if the FW has user management and SSL VPN functions configured and the configuration saved in the database, such as the user name, user group name, security group name, or SSL user role, contains non-ASCII characters that need to be converted, the device automatically restarts. After the restart, the conversion is successful. In this case, you are advised to perform the conversion during off-peak hours.

After the UTF-8 encoding format is used, note that the encoding format of the CLI terminal software must be set to UTF-8 as well. Otherwise, entered characters may be displayed as garbled characters.

The FW's character encoding format must be consistent with that of the interconnected third-party system, such as the authentication server. Otherwise, the interconnection fails if there are non-ASCII characters.

If the encoding format is switched to UTF-8 when the device already has service configurations, some configurations may fail to be transcoded. To resolve this problem, the FW provides the following method:

• Specify the original encoding format of the existing configuration.

  When configuring the device using the CLI, administrators can set multiple encoding formats in the terminal software, and the configurations are stored on the device in the corresponding encoding formats. Before transcoding, run the set old-encoding-charset mode { gbk | utf-8 } command to specify the original encoding format, so that the FW can perform the transcoding. Currently, the original encoding format can be GBK or UTF-8. That is, other encoding formats may not be properly transcoded to UTF-8. If the original encoding is unknown, specify any encoding format and run the display language charset conversion preview command to preview the configuration conversion result. If the result is normal without garbled characters, the specified original encoding format is correct.

  

  As the configuration delivered through the web UI can only be in the GBK format, while the configuration delivered through the CLI can be in the UTF-8 format (depending on the CLI terminal), these two encoding formats may co-exist on the device. In this case, even if the original encoding format is specified, not all configurations can be successfully transcoded.

• View the configurations that are not properly transcoded and modify them.

  If the system informs you of transcoding failures on certain configurations, run the display language charset exception configuration command to view the exception configurations, delete or modify such configurations, and perform transcoding again. The exception configurations include overlong configurations after transcoding and configurations that cannot be transcoded. UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding format. Each character contains 1 to 6 bytes. After the encoding format is switched to UTF-8, some character strings entered in the previous GBK format may fail to be transcoded because their length exceeds that for UTF-8.