Ensure Correct Character Encoding

The CommWeb payment gatewayBatch supports most commonly used character encoding formats (UTF-8 and Latin1 (ISO-8859-1) ), providing you with a level of flexibility when submitting files for processing. The character encoding used in the file must be specified in the content-type HTTP header. Where no character encoding is supplied, Batch will attempt to process the file using Latin1 (ISO-8859-1) encoding by default.

If the specified character encoding is not supported by Batch, the batch request is rejected. An HTTP error of 415 Unsupported Media Type is returned.

The content-type header must be set on the HTTPS PUT message with the correct encoding. An example content type header would be:

"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8"

Batch would then decode incoming data as UTF-8.

Though UTF-8 is a supported character encoding format, there are a number of fields (for example, order.reference) that will only accept ISO-8859-1 characters. This is due to downstream financial systems not being able to support all UTF-8 characters.