What do machine dependent characters mean?

Machine dependent characters are new restrictions on new SKU migrated Rakuten stores. Rakuten will no longer accept characters such as Roman numerals in raw format (as is). Therefore, we have to process these characters differently than the rest of the texts, which eventually causes an increase in texts' overall lengths. In general, one machine dependent characters could take up the size of 8 characters combined.


How does this change affect me as a merchant?

  • This may potentially cause your all of your product descriptions, title become longer than usual and rejected by our validation because description is too long.
  • As we are doing this to our best effort, there might be cases where we have not caught machine dependent characters to process as there are millions of possible characters. In that case, please do not hesitate to raise a support case with us and we will help you as soon as possible. You will see this error if your product failed to publish due to machine dependent characters

What are the machine dependent characters?

Here are the list of machine dependent characters. Please note that during testing we have identified more machine dependent characters that are not included in the list.

References