Smarten uses MySQL or HSQL DB as its metadata database.
If the MySQL character encoding or HSQL DB character encoding is not UTF-8, the issue in displaying Smarten meta-data such as object title, object properties, etc. with special characters occurs.
The UTF-8 character encoding set supports many alphabets and characters for a wide variety of languages.
In HSQL DB, by default, the character set encoding will be UTF-8. But, the default character set for MySQL is Latin, and MySQL may not display some characters properly.
To resolve this, encoding of metadata database should be set to UTF 8 encoding.
Solution:
If the MySQL database is not created yet, the below code has to be added with the syntax on MySQL console.
CREATE DATABASE dbname CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
If the database (MySQL and HSQL) is already created, then use the below code in the console.
ALTER DATABASE dbname CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
Note: This article is based on Smarten Version 5.0. This may or may not be relevant to the Smarten version you may be using.