Encoding of socket data

The socket client encodes data that is sent to the agent.

It is important to be aware of how your socket client is encoding data that is being sent to the agent.

Special characters

Data sent to the agent must not contain any newline characters except at the end of each event or data sample. Newline characters that occur inside of attribute values must be replaced with a different character or encoded as shown in (Table 1). You must also be careful not to break the XML syntax with your attribute values. The following table shows the characters that occur in the attribute values that you encode:

Table 1. Characters to encode in attribute values
Character	Header
`&`	`&`
`<`	`<`
`>`	`>`
`“`	`"`
`'`	`'`
`\n`	` `

Note: The agent uses the newline character to separate responses received from a client. Unexpected newline characters prevent data from being parsed correctly.

The agent does not contain a full-featured XML parser so you must not use special encoding for characters not in (Table 1). For example, do not encode ¢ or &cent in place of a cent sign ¢.

Character sets

In addition to encoding special characters, the agent must know what code page was used to encode your data. Define each socket attribute group to indicate whether you are sending the data to the agent as UTF-8 data or as Local code page. Be aware of how your client is sending data. If you use a client that is written in Java™, specify UTF-8 as the encoding on the writer you use to send data to the agent. Specify UTF-8 as the Code Page for your attribute group. Local code page means the local code page of the agent. If the data is sent over a remote socket, it must conform to the local code page of the agent or use UTF-8.

Numeric Data

Be aware of how you are formatting your numeric attribute values. The numeric values that you send to the agent must not contain any special characters. One example is the thousands separator character. Other examples are currency symbols or characters that describe the units of the value. If the agent encounters a problem when it is parsing numeric data, it logs an error that indicates the issue. The Performance Object Status Error Code is not set when an attribute fails to parse. The following is an example error message from the agent log:

(4D3F1FD6.0021-9:utilities.cpp,205,"parseNumericString") Invalid characters :00:04 \
found getting numeric value from 00:00:04, returning 0.000000

Note: For information about how a time stamp attribute must be formatted, see (Time stamp).