strange characters in my xhtml (ex: )

[stef25]

Text that says "Africa, an Overcrowded Continent" is being generated by my CMS as Africa, an Overcrowded Continent. this is how it appears in the client. when i try to validate the page, W3C says there are characters it can not interpret as utf8.

obviously this is an issue with character encoding. im just wondering why it only generates these characters between certain words, and not others?

edit: in my original posting, the error did not appear. & # 160; is what appears between overcrowded and continent. i can not google that string (no results appear?) and its not rendered on page. it does appear in the source which makes believe its actually equal to a "space", but W3C can nevertheless validate my page cause of it.

so how could i stop this stuff from appearing in my source? it appears in an article which is entered into the cms by the author and he entered nothing i can see that would have caused these characters to appear.

[Dan Schulz]

Got a link?

[stef25]

you got PM. is this any use, since you cant see the backend cms and database? its all generated dynamically

[AutisticCuckoo]

The   (non-breaking space) will be a problem if it occurs as a single octet with value 160 (A0). That is not valid UTF-8; it must be encoded as two octets (C2 A0).

Either change the declared encoding to ISO-8859-1 or make sure that the content delivered from your CMS is properly encoded as UTF-8. If it's not UTF-8 from the database, you'll have to add an encoding filter that fixes the problems.

[Dan Schulz]

Looking at the link...

<!-- start excerpt -->
<img src="/images/443t.gif" alt="Hunter Thompson - Gonzo" class="thumb_article" />
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold…”

	<p>So Hunter Thompson began his crowning work “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, ...</p>
<span class="continue_reading"><a rel="bookmark" href="/article/964/hunter-thompson-gonzo-journalist" title="Permanent link to this article">Continue reading &gt;&gt;</a></span>

</div><!-- ends .middle_content_box_2 --><!-- THIS FORM LISTS ARTICLES ON A COUNTRY PAGE -->
<div class="middle_content_box_2">

<!-- start article title -->
<h2 class="content_box_header"><a href="/article/1064/india-an-overcrowded-continent" >India - An Overcrowded& #160;Continent</a></h2>

Replace the quotation marks with their appropriate character entities, and replace the & #160; (note: space added by me in both instances) with a regular space between "Overcrowded" and "Continent" .