FLOW: Latin 1 (ISO/IEC 8859-1) coding on a UTF-8 server machine

Firstly, the generic reader in FME Form (Workspaces) supports changing encoding for certain formats, but the option to specify encoding depends on the underlying format you select within the generic reader. For example, text-based formats like CSV or TXT often have an "Encoding" parameter in their reader settings., any Generic format removes the option to specify encoding on the reader. 

Secondly, you may wish to edit the workspace, place a tester, from the passed port add Logger with log and record set. Next time you run in FME Flow, you can get a better idea of the character. Sometimes you can use a StringReplacer, replacing each special character (like á, é, í, ó, ú, ü, ñ, etc. with nothing?) or using a Regular Expression Spanish [áéíóúüñÁÉÍÓÚÜÑ] or German [äöüßÄÖÜ]

Python and StringPairReplacer also options

here is a similar article in the Community 

This is from AI Assist:

The "invalid byte ‘local character’" error in FME Flow usually indicates a character encoding issue, often when reading or writing data that contains non-ASCII or special local characters. This can happen if the data source uses a different encoding (like UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, etc.) than what FME expects.

Here are some steps to troubleshoot and resolve this:

1. Identify the data format and source. Check if your source (e.g., CSV, database, shapefile) specifies an encoding, and ensure it matches what FME is set to use.
2. For text-based formats (like CSV), set the correct encoding in the Reader parameters (look for a parameter like "Character Encoding").
3. If you need to convert encodings, use the TextEncoder transformer to encode or decode text attributes.

Hmm thanks for this.

In regards of the first part then I’m not sure where those encoding parameters you mention should be in a generic reader?

Then for the second then it does not help to add a transformers such as StringReplacer or AttributEncoders to a workspace that fails by kicking off the Reader to begin with..

Does anyone else have some tips?

Yeah only formats like CSV, database, shape file… have parameter options for encoding.I suspect the formats you are converting don’t have options to change the default encoding. You can read up about https://docs.safe.com/fme/html/FME-Flow/AdminGuide/Configuring_Character_Encoding.htm This required going into the flow machine and Open the web application's deployment descriptor web.xml file, make changes as per the help

So what does the Flow log transaction error with? Including these as attachments helps to narrow down the issue.

Thanks for the help ​@j.botterill but I’ve decided to dig into the method that ​@david_r proposed, so far it looks very promising so thank you for that ​@david_r :)