Why does a diamond with a questionmark in it � appear in my HTML?

Question

I have an unorder list, and � often (but not always!) appears where I have have two spaces between characters. What is causing this, and how do I prevent it?

There is likely an encoding issue with a special character that is not recognized by the character set specified in the document. — Jared, Mar 07 '13 at 16:17
check your doctype(encoding) declaration, probably your database or doctype is not using the same, or maybe your browser. — Toping, Mar 07 '13 at 16:17
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25222973/weird-characters-in-url — trante, Aug 13 '14 at 22:31
Related: [UTF-8 all the way through](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/279170/utf-8-all-the-way-through) — Quentin, Jun 30 '16 at 10:12

Pekka · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-07T16:40:51.220

43

This specific character � is usually the sign of an invalid (non-UTF-8) character showing up in an output (like a page) that has been declared to be UTF-8. It happens often when

a database connection is not UTF-8 encoded (even if the tables are)
a HTML or script source file is stored in the wrong encoding (e.g. Windows-1252 instead of UTF-8) - make sure it's saved as a UTF-8 file. The setting is often in the "Save as..." dialog.
an online source (like a widget or a RSS feed) is fetched that isn't serving UTF-8

edited Mar 07 '13 at 16:40

answered Mar 07 '13 at 16:18

Pekka

442,112
142
972
1,088

No database and no RSS and using UTF-8. – user1032531 Mar 07 '13 at 16:30
@user so what's your situation then? Where does the character come from? – Pekka Mar 07 '13 at 16:34
I think I long ago cut and pasted from a MS Word document. It doesn't appear if I look at the text using a basic text editor (i.e. Note) – user1032531 Mar 07 '13 at 16:36
@user make sure the file is stored as UTF-8. You may have a select field to that effect in the "save as..." dialog – Pekka Mar 07 '13 at 16:37
But if I cut and past from the browsers source code to Note, it shows them. In regards to my previous post, when I open the file directly using MS Note, it does not show them. – user1032531 Mar 07 '13 at 16:38
@user make sure the file is stored as UTF-8. You may have a select field to that effect in the "save as..." dialog – Pekka Mar 07 '13 at 16:39
3

Brilliant! It was saved as Windows 1252. Please add this to your answer. Thanks! – user1032531 Mar 07 '13 at 16:40
I was trying to UrlFetch in Apps Script. It turns out it was in 1252 format in the source html. `ret = u.getContentText("Windows-1252");` worked. – Adrian Dec 29 '21 at 18:07

score 5 · Answer 2 · edited Jan 17 '22 at 09:50

5

I had the same issue ....

You can fix it by adding the following line in your template !

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

edited Jan 17 '22 at 09:50

yivi

42,438
18
116
138

answered Mar 24 '15 at 17:19

pradip

197
4
11

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 07 '13 at 16:19

4

It's a character-set issue. Get a tool that inspects the response headers of the server (like the Firebug extension if you're using Mozilla Firefox) to see what character set the server response is sending with the content. If the server's character-set and the HTML character set of the actual content don't match up, you will see some strange looking characters like those little black diamond squares.

answered Mar 07 '13 at 16:19

topcat3

2,561
6
33
57

I have Firebug. Do you mean look at the HTML tab? I see the same � there. – user1032531 Mar 07 '13 at 16:24
Use the Net tab and there you can see all requests and responses and headers – topcat3 Mar 07 '13 at 16:28

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 19 '19 at 13:43

1

I had the same issue when getting an HTML output from an XSLT. Along with Pradip's solution I was also able to resolve the issue using UTF-32.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-32" />

answered Mar 19 '19 at 13:43

Nathanael Istre

101
1
4

Why does a diamond with a questionmark in it � appear in my HTML?

4 Answers4

Linked