Strange characters appearing in Control Panel

Issue

• We are observing a strange behavior in the system, where many fields display strange values, such as "   ", in both System Settings and Instance Settings.
• We are also seeing the following WARN in our logs:

  WARN [main][MainServlet:229] The default JVM character set "windows-1252" is not UTF. Please review the JVM property "file.encoding".

Environment

• Liferay 2024.Q1.1

Resolution

• The file.encoding property of setenv.bat (or setenv.sh) is behind the observed issue. According to our documentations linked below, UTF-8 should be used, both in the database and in the JVM.
• This issue was caused by using a different encoding than UTF-8, and subsequently resolved by switching to UTF-8.

Additional Information

• Multilingual character sets require using UTF-8
• DXP requires UTF-8 file encoding to support internationalization