Russian language API import problem

[MrgampRus]

Hello,
When importing data in Russian, there is a problem with displaying text
Using a powershell script to import data about virtual machines, when the script is executed in powershell, the line is displayed correctly.

NetBox (v3.4.1)

[candlerb]

How are you "importing" this data - I am guessing via the REST API?

What character set is this data in? If the data is in UTF-8 I'd expect it to work without issues.

Please can you show your powershell script (and the data file, if it's separate) using hexdump -C, to show it as both text and hex.

Or: can you show the raw HTTP transaction to Netbox, e.g. by running

tcpdump -i lo -nn -A -s0 tcp port 8001

on the server where Netbox is running.

[candlerb]

If this string is encoded with some Windows-specific encoding, then it will show fine when printed from Windows, but will be interpreted as garbage if you send it to an API which expects UTF-8 encoded JSON.

If you run the tcpdump command I showed you (actually, you should use -X rather than -A, to get the packets in raw hex), then you can see the actual bytes which are being sent to Netbox.

[candlerb]

FYI, here is a test I just did using curl and Netbox v3.4.2 (and Google Translate!)

# curl -sS -d '{"name":"тест вм","comments":"Привет мир","cluster":1,"vcpus":8}' \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -H "Authorization: Token $TOKEN" \
    "$NETBOX/api/virtualization/virtual-machines/" | jq .
{
  "id": 146,
  "url": "https://XXXXXXXX/api/virtualization/virtual-machines/146/",
  "display": "тест вм",
  "name": "тест вм",
  "status": {
    "value": "active",
    "label": "Active"
  },
  "site": null,
  "cluster": {
    "id": 1,
    "url": "https://XXXXXXXX/api/virtualization/clusters/1/",
    "display": "nuc-lxd",
    "name": "nuc-lxd"
  },
  "device": null,
  "role": null,
  "tenant": null,
  "platform": null,
  "primary_ip": null,
  "primary_ip4": null,
  "primary_ip6": null,
  "vcpus": 8,
  "memory": null,
  "disk": null,
  "comments": "Привет мир",
  "local_context_data": null,
  "tags": [],
  "custom_fields": {
    "snmp_module": null
  },
  "config_context": {},
  "created": "2023-01-11T11:08:21.070902Z",
  "last_updated": "2023-01-11T11:08:21.070956Z"
}

Note that the response "comments" is exactly as expected.

[MrgampRus]

do you suppose that you need to convert the commens string to utf8 in the script? Thanks

[candlerb]

That looks like the response from Netbox. It includes literal question marks (ASCII code 3f) because the data has already been mangled.

What you need to look at is the request to Netbox API, where it provides the comments string in Russian.

[MrgampRus]

Thanks for the help, added [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes - and it helped me now the text is displayed correctly.