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Here is my solution to the encoding issues, let me know if it works for you (assuming your environment let you access the body of the request without parsing it, or already knows how to parse it correctly).

http://blog.cyberion.net/2014/08/parsing-paypal-ipn-requests...

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Thanks, but that's a wholly separate issue from what I was talking about.

When you have UTF8 data in the IPN, PayPal translates it to win1252 in the IPN. But it verifies the IPN against the original UTF8 data. The only way to fix it is to go into the profile and change the IPN format to use UTF8. There is no programmatic way to set the encoding for IPNs to be sent in and there are no workarounds that I am aware of.

If you never see international names or addresses with accents and diacritics you won't run into the problem.

That's not my experience, validating the data has always worked by just spitting it back out to them without any alterations to the data.

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