Wrong character encoding with google apps emailing script

[Benoit Louckx]

Hi all, 

My question is very short :

Does anyone know a way to set the character encoding of the Google Apps Engine on UTF-8 ??  

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But the reason of my question is very long : 

I made a google apps script to send a mass emailing from a google spreadsheet list of email addresses.

The email is bases on an html template. Everything works fine and all characters sets (UTF-8) are correctly parsed by the browser behalf 

except for the Google Map widget embedded in the email body:

>> I sent an invitation confirmation by email to some people with an embedded Google Map widget that shows the route description from their home to my office (image + text). Look at the print screen : 

The problem are the characters in yellow. In place of the �� I should have this character : é 

This is in a French character and it isn't correctly parsed here. But the problem doesn't come from the browser which is using the correct encoding (parameters : UTF-8). Like I said I put the same characters in the introduction of my email (not visible on the print screen) and they are correctly parsed. 

The difference is that here the text in yellow is created are returned by the Google Map web application to the Google Apps script (it is a route description text like you have in Google Map when you fill in your address and the place you want to go to). 

And the Google Apps script doesn't do the correct parsing for these characters. 

We can see that in the debugger view below :

This is the view of the script editor debugger. More explanations on code (I put in yellow the concerned pieces of code in this case) :

- upper part :  shows the script > I put a red bullet breakpoint on the place of the script where the value of the route description is passed to the concerned object (name of object is 'step')

This piece of code comes from the Google Map widget. 

" html_instructions" is the javascript property that has an html string value > you can see it at the part on the bottom on the right > it is " Chauss\ufffd\ufffde de Ninove/Ninoofsesteenweg/N8 etc." 

This is the string value containing the characters that make problem. The " \ufffd\ufffde " characters are parsed by the Google Apps script as "  �� " like you see on the line just underneath. 

So the wrong character encoding is done by the Google Apps Engine itself (if I browse to Google Map and ask for the same route description the characters are rendered correctly).

>> Therefore my question : does anyone know a way to set the character encoding of the Google Apps Engine on UTF-8 ?? 

Thanks if you can help on this :-) :-) an thanks if you read my post until here :-) :-) :-)

Benoît Louckx