We've got the same issue, but with an incoming HL7 feed with embedded, encoded characters - would be nice to be able to detect what's coming in, but I take it from this discussion that's not (reliably) possible. Don't really want to scan the whole text of every incoming message to heuristically look for possible encodings. Upstream say/think they are sending UTF-8, but we seem to be getting Window-1252, for the characters we've seen in the (limited) testing. Who knows what will come through the feed once it goes live!
Never mind, our support people had updated the Java version, despite what the logs said! And because they hadn't restarted Ensemble/the server, it still had the old JAVA_HOME in its environment. We are currently banging their heads against the nearest wall for them! 🙄
If only MSH-18 were set... 🙄 Up-stream system isn't setting it! And until yesterday supplier of upstream system was claiming they were sending UTF-8 when we thought the feed looked awfully like Windows-1252. Yesterday they admitted/confirmed they are sending Windows-1252, so at least now we know!!