Character encoding when sending to TCP port

[helge]

I am sending data to a TCP port I configured for input on the Splunk server. How should the (string) data be encoded - ASCII, ANSI (in that case: which codepage?), UTF-8 or UTF-16 (aka UCS-2)?

[helge · Accepted solution]

Based on my experiments it seems Splunk expects the encoding to be UTF-8. I sent strings with German, Greek and Russing special characters and they were displayed correctly in the web UI.

Example:

I also tried UCS-2, but that did not work out too well: