Spaces between every letter from .log files on Windows

[TimR]

Hello,

I have the same problem as this post: https://community.graylog.org/t/added-space-in-logs-from-filebeat/13562

Running:

• Graylog 3.2
• Sidecar 1.0.2
• Filebeats included with sidecar
• Also tested with Filebeats.latest

I have a similar post on the Filebeat forum: https://discuss.elastic.co/t/spaces-between-every-letter-from-log-files-on-windows/221758

I tried tailing the log, that did not help.
When I copy / paste the text from the Graylog console, it pastes correctly (i.e. no spaces).
If I need to search the Filebeat, I have to do something similar: “[ I N F O ]”, even though in the actual log it should be “[INFO]”, so I don’t think it’s just a display problem.

Thank you,

~Tim

[schurd (Dietmar Schurr)]

Hello Tim,
in my case the encoding was the problem.
Make sure you define in the filebeat configuration the correct encoding. If the system which has filebeat running has unicode (utf-16) but your encoding is for example latin1 or utf-8 this will result in the spaces between all the letters.
Change the encoding to
encoding: utf-16le-bom
this may help.

Regards,
Dietmar

[TimR]

WhooHoo!!! Thank you Dietmar, that was exactly the problem! Logs look great now =)