Characters Check tool
The Characters Check tool inspects each translation for character-level problems and records findings on the block's properties as QA issues. It can flag forbidden characters that must not appear in the target, required characters that are present in the source but missing from the target, and characters that cannot be encoded in a named character set. It also detects common corruption: mojibake (UTF-8 misread as Latin-1), the Unicode replacement character, and control characters. A target locale is required.
Corruption checking is on by default. The forbidden, required, and charset checks are opt-in: the forbidden and required checks activate when their character lists are supplied, and the charset check activates when explicitly enabled.
Parameters
| Parameter | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
charset | string | ISO-8859-1 | Name of the character set encoding to check against (e.g. ISO-8859-1) |
checkCharset | boolean | false | Warn if a character is not included in the specified character set encoding |
checkCorrupted | boolean | true | Check for common corruption patterns such as mojibake |
forbiddenChars | string | Characters that should not appear in target text (e.g. {}[]) | |
requiredChars | string | Characters that must appear in target if present in source (e.g. punctuation) |
Configure these parameters interactively and copy the flow-step YAML on the Tool Reference.
Examples
Forbid specific characters
Flag any target containing curly braces or square brackets.
forbiddenChars: "{}[]"Restrict to a legacy encoding
Warn about characters that cannot be encoded in ISO-8859-1.
checkCharset: true charset: ISO-8859-1
Processing notes
Operates on translatable blocks; non-translatable structure passes through unchanged.
Findings are stored on the block as a JSON array of QA issues.
Limitations
Forbidden and required character lists are matched per character, not as substrings or patterns.
Corruption detection covers a fixed set of common mojibake patterns plus replacement and control characters.
Requires a configured target locale; blocks without a translation for it are skipped.
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