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My submission was rejected with error-reason “Submission is not utf8, existing database entry is utf8”. Why?

April 26, 2017database error-reason existing submission utf8

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My submission was rejected with error-reason “Submission is not utf8, existing database entry is utf8”. Why?

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The reason why a UTF-8 encoded entry can’t be overwritten with a non-UTF-8 entry is that a UTF-8 entry (eg. in Japanese) may contain character data which can’t be presented in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. These characters will, except for some Eastern characters which will be transliterated, be shown as question marks in clients which haven’t been updated to support UTF-8 (the entry is, in fact, probably all right). This will provoke people to try and overwrite it (eg. with transliterated Japanese, or worse, S-JIS presented as ISO-8859-1) while there might be no need to do so. This message will become less common as clients are updated. Ask the author of the application you use to support UTF-8.