Weird Characters <?> and Â

**ripcurlksm** · Dec 8, 2008 14:42

I am working on re-launching a website, and I am having some data display issues that Im not sure if its CSS problems, general UTF character issues or other.
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Here is what the live site looks like (good):
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Here is what my new site looks like, with identical data (bad):
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Here is what the data looks like

PHP Code:


<p class="MsoNormal" ><b><span><o:p>Â </o:p></span></b></p>                 <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span>i.<span>Â Â Â                     </span>Types of Heart Valve Disorders<o:p></o:p></span></p>                 <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.25in;"><span>a. Valvular Stenosis<o:p></o:p></span></p>                 <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.25in;"><span>b. Valvular Regurgitation<o:p></o:p></span></p>                 <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.25in;"><span>c. Valve Prolapse<o:p></o:p></span></p>                 <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span>ii.<span>Â Â Â                     </span>Heart Valve Disorder Treatment Strategies<o:p></o:p></span></p>                 <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span>iii.<span>Â Â  </span>Heart Valve Repairs and Replacements, Combined Procedure Volumes                    Forecast<o:p></o:p></span></p>                 <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.25in;"><span>a. Annuloplasty Device Implantations<o:p></o:p></span></p>                 <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.25in;"><span>b. Mechanical Heart Valve Implantations<o:p></o:p></span></p>                 <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.25in;"><span>c. Tissue Valve Implantations<o:p></o:p></span></p>

What would make it display differently in one instance, and different in another with the same data??

**mixmastermidori** · Dec 8, 2008 20:52

Did you copy and paste the text from somewhere? If so, try deleting the space between those outline numbers and the text and adding new spaces. I don't know if that makes sense, but it works for me when I see those funny marks.

**AutisticCuckoo** · Dec 9, 2008 00:46

The character encoding you declare doesn't match the encoding you've used in your document.

**ripcurlksm** · Dec 9, 2008 15:33

@autistic -- I am currently using UTF-8, and I've tried switching my header to Latin, ISO, and its still outputting the same. What encoding should I use? Here is my current header:

PHP Code:


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">

<head>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

@mixmaster -- yes the text was copied from a client, I would edit everything, but there are literally thousands of these instances. Im a little puzzled because this is working on my current site, no weird characters... but now on my new demo site i guess my character encoding is wrong.

**AutisticCuckoo** · Dec 10, 2008 01:40

Originally Posted by ripcurlksm

What encoding should I use?

The important thing is that the encoding you use matches the encoding you declare. Otherwise browsers will misinterpret the ones and zeroes and show the wrong characters.

I generally recommend UTF-8 if at all possible, since that allows you to literally represent any ISO/IEC 10646 character. If you use a more restricted encoding, like ISO 8859-1, you'll have to use entity references or numeric character references to represent characters that aren't can't be represented literally (like dashes, curly quotes, ellipses, non-Latin characters, etc.)

Originally Posted by ripcurlksm

Here is my current header:

The header is meaningless if your web server declares the encoding in the Content-Type HTTP header (which is very common).

Assuming your server also declares the encoding as UTF-8, you must make sure that every character in your document is encoded as UTF-8.

The code fragments you posted indicate that you've written the document in something like MS Word and saved as HTML. As far as I know, Word doesn't use UTF-8 by default, but a Microsoft-specific encoding (Windows-1252).

That would explain the question marks in the black diamonds, since Windows-1252 characters with a code position greater than 127 will be invalid characters when interpreted as UTF-8 (which uses two octets to represent those characters).

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