Help!? Special Characters (e.g. é, ê, è, ç) do not appear properly

Steffano2002

Hi there,

As you can see in the below screenshot (poorly circled in red), all "special characters" (e.g. é, ê, è, ç) do not appear properly whether in FireFox or IE... They either come up as an icon with a "?" (don't know if this will work but I'll paste it anyway: "�") in it or as some kind of code (e.g. "&#65533")



I do not understand what could be causing the problem!?

Thank you in advance for your help!

Steffano2002

I've just realised that I can actually see these special characters on boards.ie!? oO
Could it be the actual website?

Capt'n Midnight

I can see the characters at this end - no screenshot though

have you changed or installed any fonts recently - system fonts perhaps ?

áúìò

Steffano2002

Would have helped if I hadn't forgotten the screenshot... Apologies :rolleyes:

theothernt

Hi,

The strange symbols appear when you try to use a character that is not supported by the "character set" of that web page.

Ideally, each page is supposed to specify its own codepage. When this does not happen, the browser will use it's default codepage - which depends on the OS, browser and country/region you live in.

The problem with the site above is that it was made on a PC with a certain character set. The character set is NOT specified in the web page itself. This means that it looks okay on anyone's PC that uses the same character set as the author's PC. If you use a different character set, like on your PC it, the browser will either guess or use your PC's character set - and if your character set does not support certain characters, you see strange symbols like the above. (I hope that makes some sense!)

Characters like � are supposed to be Unicode but as the web page wasn't made properly, the character doesn't display.

My suggestion, if you're not very experienced in HTML, etc is to use an editor like Dreamweaver 8 which can handle all this character set stuff for you. It should also be able to fix invalid characters.

- Neil

cgarvey

It's because the HTML is � .. and not � .. i.e. something has escaped the & to the proper HTML equivalent of &... so that could have been done on input (i.e. on the article/comment submission page if someone typed "�" then it was correctly escaped). However if the string stored in the file/db is actually "�" then the web software (looks like it's Nuked Klan) is incorrectly escaping the ampersand.

So, it's not a page encoding issue (client or server), it's because the & was escaped either on input, or on output.

.cg

theothernt

cgarvey wrote:

It's because the HTML is � .. and not � .. i.e. something has escaped the & to the proper HTML equivalent of &... so that could have been done on input (i.e. on the article/comment submission page if someone typed "�" then it was correctly escaped). However if the string stored in the file/db is actually "�" then the web software (looks like it's Nuked Klan) is incorrectly escaping the ampersand.

So, it's not a page encoding issue (client or server), it's because the & was escaped either on input, or on output.

.cg

I agree about the "&" being escaped to "&amp" but having no codepage declarion will causes issues. For example, the top of the post: "Postée par V'olt# le mercredi 11 janvier 2006 à 19:27"

- Neil

cgarvey

You're right, sorry, I was just looking at the &#12345 circles. So it's a combination of improper escaping and codepage issues; and we can safely establish that it's the site that is at fault, not the OP's PC or Firefox

Steffano2002

Hi guys!

Thank you for your replies! I have to admit, I struggle to understand your posts fully... What I do find weird is that when I'm in work I can see most (not all though) of the special characters!

Is there something I need to do in my Windows XP settings at home in order for these characters to appear properly? Maybe something in the Regional Settings?

Thanks again for all your help!

Steffano2002

Could anybody help me with this please?

cgarvey

What characters can you see in work that appear funny at home?

Steffano2002

All those circle in red in the screenshot in the OP...

cgarvey

Well there's 2 problems. The first one, page encoding, can be overwridden on your browser (in Firefox: View | Character Encoding, and choose the UTF one). That would help with the first and last circle in your post. However if you can see the other circles as characters, then there's a bug in your browser (as it shouldn't be rendering that piece of HTML as a character).

Other than that, I don't know how you're managing to get the characters to display.

.cg

Steffano2002

cgarvey wrote:

Well there's 2 problems. The first one, page encoding, can be overwridden on your browser (in Firefox: View | Character Encoding, and choose the UTF one). That would help with the first and last circle in your post. However if you can see the other circles as characters, then there's a bug in your browser (as it shouldn't be rendering that piece of HTML as a character).

Hi cgarvey,

Thank you for the tip about the Character Encoding settings in FireFox! I'll try that when I get home this evening!

cgarvey wrote:

Other than that, I don't know how you're managing to get the characters to display.

.cg

Can you not see them when you visit the webpage?

Steffano2002

Well well well! What do you know! Changing the Character Encoding settings in FireFox has resolved (most of) the problem!

I'm still getting a few "�" here and there but no more "&#65533"!

Thanks again cgarvey!