Overview
This check validates that the data sent within your Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) Web SDK requests consists only of standard ASCII characters.
Because AEP relies on a highly structured XDM (Experience Data Model), the presence of non-ASCII characters—such as "smart quotes," unencoded symbols (e.g., ©, ™), or non-standard foreign characters, can cause the Edge Network to misinterpret the JSON payload.
This check ensures that your page names, link names, and custom attributes are safely encoded before they are transmitted to the Adobe Experience Platform.
Why it is important
Maintaining strict character standards is essential for the reliability of your global data pipeline:
Preventing Data Corruption: Non-ASCII characters that are not properly UTF-8 encoded can be "mangled" during transmission. A page name like
Products — Allmight appear in AEP asProducts — All, making your reports difficult to read and search.Schema Validation Failures: In some cases, the AEP Edge Network or downstream destinations (like a cloud-based Data Lake) may reject an entire XDM hit if it encounters unexpected binary data or control characters.
Broken Audience Segmentation: If you create a segment in AEP based on a specific product name that contains a special character (e.g.,
Café), and if that character is sent as a non-ASCII string, the user will not match the segment rules.Export & Integration Stability: Many third-party tools that consume AEP data via the Edge Network (such as Amazon S3 or Google Cloud) have strict requirements for character encoding. Clean ASCII data ensures these integrations do not fail during daily exports.
Implementation
We have made implementing this check for AEP Tags simple.
Create an Audit that crawls your entire site or a specific set of high-value URLs.
Review the Pre-built ObservePoint Report for pages where AEP tags captured Non-ASCII characters.
Remediation
If your AEP tags are found to contain non-ASCII characters, follow these steps to sanitize your data:
Standardize Data Layer Inputs: Ensure that your site's Data Layer uses standard characters. Work with your developers to strip "smart quotes" or special symbols at the source.
Use JavaScript Encoding: In your AEP Tag (Launch) Custom Code or Data Elements, use functions like
encodeURIComponent()or a custom regex to replace special characters with their ASCII equivalents (e.g., replacing—with-).Update Schema Definitions: If your business requires foreign characters (e.g., Japanese or Arabic script), ensure that your XDM Schema and the AEP platform are configured to expect and handle UTF-8 encoding.
Check Copy/Paste Errors: Many non-ASCII issues are caused by copying text from word processors (like Microsoft Word) into the AEP Tag Manager interface. Always use a plain-text editor when configuring static values in your tags.
Original Value | ASCII Equivalent | Common Source |
|
| "Smart" Em-Dash from Word. |
|
| Copyright Symbol. |
|
| Accented characters. |
Conclusion
Character encoding is a fundamental yet often overlooked aspect of data governance. By ensuring your Adobe Experience Platform tags only include ASCII or properly encoded UTF-8 characters, you protect the clarity of your reporting and the stability of your cross-platform integrations. Using ObservePoint to automate this check prevents "garbage data" from polluting your Customer Data Platform.