SES template/email cannot render Japanese text

Question

I created the SES template and rendered it from the aws-cli, as you can see the non-English texts are replaced by '?', both in plain text version and HTML version. How to fix this? P.S: I also checked it by sending an email.

the following is my TestMainTemplate.json file

{
        "Template": {
            "TemplateName": "TestTemplate01",
            "SubjectPart": "こんにちは {{name}}!",
            "HtmlPart": "こんにちは {{name}}さん
あなたの好きなAWSサービスは{{favoriteservice}}ですね。",
            "TextPart": "前略 {{name}}さん
あなたの好きなAWSサービスは{{favoriteservice}}ですね。
草々"
        }
    }

comamnd to upload template to aws SES from cli :

aws ses create-template --cli-input-json file://TestMainTemplate.json --region us-east-1

command to render the template:

aws ses test-render-template --template-name TestTemplate01 --template-data '{ "name": "大栗" , "favoriteservice": "SES" }' --region us-east-1

output:

Date: 2018-09-14T03:27:46.913Z
Message-ID: <5990...........ec2-user@ip-......ec2.internal>
Subject: ????? ??!
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
    boundary="----=_Part_106793_202759574.1536895666913"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

------=_Part_106793_202759574.1536895666913
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

?? ????
???????AWS?????SES????
??
------=_Part_106793_202759574.1536895666913
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

????? ????
???????AWS?????SES????
------=_Part_106793_202759574.1536895666913--

user_5297460 · Answer

I had problems with the German ä ö ü. I changed the encoding for the uploaded json file from UTF-8 to ANSI and all was fine.
I could already see the scrambled characters after uploading the template and sending a get-template command via the AWS CLI. Changing the encoding to ANSI did the job for me.

Ouh and I didn't have to change the console encoding for that!

user_940259 · Answer

I suspect your terminal isn't set to UTF-8. What does echo $LANG say? In my case it's:

$ echo $LANG 
en_NZ.UTF-8

I tried the steps above and got back a valid rendered base64-encoded text:

$ aws --output text ses test-render-template --template-name TestTemplate01 --template-data '{ "name": "大栗" , "favoriteservice": "SES" }' --region us-east-1 
Date: 2018-09-15T23:36:13.701Z
Message-ID: <143...>
Subject: =?UTF-8?B?44GT44KT44Gr44Gh44GvIOWkp+aglyE=?=
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; 
    boundary="----=_Part_237228_701472298.1537054573701"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

------=_Part_237228_701472298.1537054573701
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

5YmN55WlIOWkp+agl+OBleOCkw0K44GC44Gq44Gf44Gu5aW944GN44GqQVdT44K144O844OT44K5
44GvU0VT44Gn44GZ44Gt44CCDQrojYnjgIU=
------=_Part_237228_701472298.1537054573701
[... etc ...]

Also what's your aws-cli version?

$ aws --version
aws-cli/1.14.14 Python/2.7.12 Linux/4.15.0-34-generic botocore/1.8.18

Apparently mine is fairly old (current is 1.16.14) and the SES command still works as expected.

I'm quite confident that it's a problem with your terminal encoding. It must be set to UTF-8 for this to work.

SES template/email cannot render Japanese text

2 Answers