KB-1094 "Unsupported encoding: XXXXX" error thrown when starting JBoss

Symptoms

When starting JBoss, the following error is printed towards the beginning of application server log:

Caused by: com.ctc.wstx.exc.WstxIOException: Unsupported encoding: XXXXX

JBoss then fails to deploy.

Cause

This "Caused by" message is printed out when one of the Jboss configuration files has been modified to an unsupported encoding mechanism. By default, encoding is set to UTF-8.

The two following examples are results of using faulty configuration files:

standalone.xml

ERROR [org.jboss.as.server] (Controller Boot Thread) JBAS015956: Caught exception during boot: org.jboss.as.controller.persistence.ConfigurationPersistenceException: JBAS014676: Failed to parse configuration
...
Caused by: com.ctc.wstx.exc.WstxIOException: Unsupported encoding: XXXXX

appian-ds.xml

ERROR [org.jboss.msc.service.fail] (MSC service thread 1-1) MSC000001: Failed to start service jboss.deployment.unit."appian-ds.xml".PARSE: org.jboss.msc.service.StartException in service jboss.deployment.unit."appian-ds.xml".PARSE: JBAS018733: Failed to process phase PARSE of deployment "appian-mysql-ds.xml"
...
Caused by: org.jboss.as.server.deployment.DeploymentUnitProcessingException: Unsupported encoding: XXXXX
...
Caused by: com.ctc.wstx.exc.WstxIOException: Unsupported encoding: XXXXX

In both examples above, the opening line encoding="UTF-8"? of the configuration files was changed. For reference, standalone.xml can be found under <JBOSS_HOME>/standalone/configuration and appian-ds.xml under <JBOSS_HOME>/standalone/deployments.

Action

Locate the problematic configuration file and change the encoding to UTF-8.

Affected Versions

This article applies to all versions of Appian using JBoss as an application server.