# Index and search "à" char

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/index-and-search-a-char/90450>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [June 22, 2017, 12:11pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/index-and-search-a-char/90450 "2017-06-22T12:11:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Gabry993](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/96bed5/32.png) [@Gabry993](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Gabry993)\
**Post date:** [June 22, 2017, 12:11pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/index-and-search-a-char/90450/1 "2017-06-22T12:11:00Z")

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Hi,  
I would like to index a document with a field like this:  
`{ "word" : "beltà"}`  
and then be able to query it for exact matching.  
I'm taking the word from a file with filebeat, performing some aggregation with logstash and then indexing it in elasticsearch.  
In kibana I see a '?' with black background instead of the 'à' char and a query which should match "beltà" gives me no results.  
Should I set a specific analyzer/tokenizer to cope with this?  
Thank you fo your attention  
Gabriele

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dadoonet](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/dadoonet/32/137187_2.png) [@dadoonet](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/dadoonet)\
**Post date:** [June 22, 2017, 12:44pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/index-and-search-a-char/90450/2 "2017-06-22T12:44:56Z")

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You first need to make sure that you are using UTF8.  
Then you can use an asciifolding token filter if you want to be able to search for a or à.

HTH

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Gabry993](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/96bed5/32.png) [@Gabry993](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Gabry993)\
**Post date:** [June 22, 2017, 12:50pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/index-and-search-a-char/90450/3 "2017-06-22T12:50:39Z")

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Thank you.  
I'm trying with an utf8 text file created with notepad++.  
I've tried both encoding plain and utf-8 with filebeat, but the black '?' is still there in kibana.  
What should I do to be sure that I'm using utf8?

Edit: What shoud I do if I have a file which is not utf8 encoded?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dadoonet](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/dadoonet/32/137187_2.png) [@dadoonet](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/dadoonet)\
**Post date:** [June 22, 2017, 2:32pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/index-and-search-a-char/90450/4 "2017-06-22T14:32:51Z")

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I found this on internet:

```auto
iconv -t UTF-8 YourFile.txt

```

Source:

> <https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11316986/how-to-convert-iso8859-15-to-utf8>

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [July 20, 2017, 2:33pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/index-and-search-a-char/90450/5 "2017-07-20T14:33:12Z")

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