The NIOS appliance supports UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format-8) encoding for the following:

• Hostnames for Microsoft Windows clients that support Microsoft Windows code pages. For information, see Configuring UTF-8 Encoding for Hostnames.
• Input fields through Grid Manager. For information, see 21744706.

UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding standard for Unicode characters. Unicode is a code table that lists the numerous scripts used by all possible characters in all possible languages. It also has a large number of technical symbols and special characters used in publishing. UTF-8 encodes each Unicode character as a variable number of one to four octets (8-bit bytes), where the number of octets depends on the integer value assigned to the Unicode character. For information about UTF-8 encoding, refer to RFC 3629 (UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646) and the ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000 Annex D. For information about Unicode, refer to The Unicode Standard.
Depending on the OS (operating system) your management system uses, you must install the appropriate language files in order to enter information in a specific language. For information about how to install language files, refer to the documentation that comes with your management system.

UTF-8 Supported Fields

The NIOS appliance supports UTF-8 encoding in all of the comment fields and most input fields. You can enter non-English characters in these data fields through Grid Manager and the Infoblox API. When you use the Infoblox API, all the non-ASCII strings must be UTF-8 encoded so that you can use Unicode characters. The NIOS appliance does not support UTF-8 encoding for data that is configurable through the Infoblox CLI commands.
In general, the following items support UTF-8 encoding:

• All the predefined and user-defined extensible attribut es.
• All the comment fields in Grid Manager.
• File name fields for FTP and TFTP backup and restore operations.
• The login banner text field. When you use the serial console or SSH, the appliance cannot correctly display the UTF-8 encoded information that you enter for the login banner.

Note: For data fields that do not support UTF-8 encoding, the appliance displays an error message when you use non-English characters.

UTF-8 Support Limitations

The NIOS appliance has the following UTF-8 support limitations:

• Object names that have data restrictions due to their usage outside of the Infoblox database do not support UTF-8 encoding. For example, IP addresses and Active Directory domain names.
• When importing a database, most of the ASCII control characters cannot be encoded. This might cause failures in upgrades or database restore operations.
• Search is based on the Unicode standard. Depending on the language, you might not be able to perform a case-sensitive search.
• Binary data is encoded as text.
• UTF-8 encoding does not fully support regular expressions. It matches constant strings. However, It does not encode characters that are inside square brackets or followed by regular expressions such as *, ?, or +.
• You can use UTF-8 characters to authenticate both the User Name and Password through the Infoblox GUI, but not through the Infoblox CLI.
• You cannot use UTF-8 characters to name a custom DHCP fingerprint. For information about DHCP fingerprint detection, see Infoblox DHCP Fingerprint Detection.