How to decode these characters? á é í

Question

I'm querying the MediaWiki API to get Wikipedia data into my Filemaker database. When I load the data into a browser, the characters show up properly but when it comes into Filemaker, characters with diacriticals get converted to these odd characters: á is converted to √° (square root symbol + degree symbol), é is converted to √© (square root symbol + copyright symbol), í is converted to √≠ (square root symbol + not equals symbol) and more. What character encoding is that? Thank you!!

Answer 1

As @Joni suggests in his comment, this is UTF-8 misinterpreted as MacRoman. Letter á is C3 A1 (hex.) in UTF-8, and C3 is “√” in MacRoman, A1 is “°”. So you should just try to set the program to interpret the data as UTF-8.

Answer 2

I'm sure this isn't the full list, but it did what I needed. Here is a lookup for the codes:

√© é e

√° á a

√≠ í i

√≥ ó o

√∂ ö o

√º ü u

√¥ ô o

√® è e

√ß ç c

√± ñ n

√∏ ø o

√´ ë e

√§ ä a

√• å a

√Å Á A

√∫ ú u

√ª û u

√Ø ï i

√â É E

√† à a

√¶ æ ae

√Æ î i

√¢ â a

√£ ã a

√î Ô O

√ü ß ss

√ì Ó O

√≤ ò o

√Ω ý y

√ñ Ö O

√™ ê e

√Ä À A

√ò Ø O

√Ö Å A

√∞ ð eth

√á Ç C

√Ç Â A

√π ù u

√í Ò O

√¨ ì i

√ú Ü U

√à È E

√û Þ Th

Answer 3

You're all correct about the misinterpreted characters, the Troi URL FMP plugin I was using to set FMP's user agent (as MediaWiki API requires) was responsible for pulling in the garbled characters. Solution was to bypass the plugin: FMP script performs Applescript "do shell script curl -A" to set user agent and query API and pull response back into FMP and all characters come through properly!