Ensure Correct Character Encoding
The Mastercard Gateway accepts only ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 encoding. You can specify the encoding to use in the content-type header on the HTTPS POST/HTTPS PUT message. If not specified, the Mastercard Gateway defaults the encoding to ISO-8859-1.
Following are examples of the content type headers:
- For the NVP protocol, use
"Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8"
- For the REST-JSON protocol, use
"Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8"
The Mastercard Gateway will reject any characters that cannot be represented in either ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8 encoding.
Although UTF-8 is a supported character format, any field which may be sent to a credit card processor is restricted to ISO-8859-1 characters. This is due to downstream financial systems not being able to support all UTF-8 characters.