Text files uploaded to S3 are encoded strangely?

Question

This is the strangest error, and I don't even know where to start understanding what's wrong.

S3 has been working well, up until suddenly one day (yesterday) it strangely encodes any text file uploaded to strange characters. Whenever a text file has Å, Ä, Ö or any other UTF-8 comparable but none English characters, the text file is messed up. I've tried uploading using various clients, as well as the web interface of AWS. The upload goes well, then I download the file and it's messed up. I've tried downloading it to my Mac, I've tried downloading it onto a Raspberry with Linux on it. Same error.

Is there any encoding done by Amazons S3 servers?!

Answer 1

I had the same problem and I solved it by adding charset=utf-8 in properties -> metadata of the file

Answer 2

You can explicitly set the "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8", on the file in the S3 console.

This will tell S3 to serve as text.

Answer 3

For those who are using boto3 (python 3) to upload and are having strange characters instead of accentuation (such as in portuguese and french languages, for example), Toni Chaz's and Sony Kadavan's answers gave me the hint to fix. Adding ";charset=utf-8" to ContentType argument when calling put_object was enough to the accentuation be shown correctly.

content_type="text/plain;charset=utf-8"
bucket_obj.put_object(Key=key, Body=data, ContentType=content_type)