Non-breaking spaces displaying incorrectly in textareas (weird unicode)

Question

Upon dumping my Postgres database and looking at the outputted queries data, here is how it should look:

<p>Persons Name started August 1, 2011.&nbsp; We will provide a courtesy account for Fall 2011 and Winter 2012.&nbsp; He will need to join an existing subscription or create a new one for Spring 2012.</p>

However from the point of the query being inserted into the text-area the output now looks like the following:

<p>Persons Name started August 1, 2011.Ã‚  We will provide a courtesy account for Fall 2011 and Winter 2012.Ã‚  He will need to join an existing subscription or create a new one for Spring 2012.Ã‚ </p> 
<p>Added web site info.</p>

The non-breaking spaces ( ) are being converted to Ã‚. This should not be happening. I am unsure of the cause behind this. Is this some kind of encoding issue?

Sidenote: TinyMCE is being used in another textarea in another spot in that same page. I've heard of conflicts with TinyMCE and textareas, so I thought it was worth noting this.

EDIT: I actually want the html tags to display as the tag itself. So <p> should not become a paragraph, it should actually stay as that.   though should be converted to a space, not this weird character.

Edit2: The encoding character set used to be us-acsii, and that was the character set when these Database entries would have been saved via TinyMCE. It is now on UTF-8.

Is the database/table in UTF8, how about the HTML page do you have a `meta` tag for UTF8? — Sam, Jun 19 '13 at 18:04
You use the word "textarea" but all I see are `
` tags. Is all of that inserted into a `` including the `<p>` tags?</p> — musicnothing, Jun 19 '13 at 18:05
@SamSullivan Yes the Database is UTF8 and there is a UTF8 meta tag. — ComputerLocus, Jun 19 '13 at 18:15
@AlexMorrise Yes it all is, and it is also suppose to stay appearing that way. On the other hand the non breaking spaces should actually appear as spaces. So, only part of it should be converted to actual html. If this is not possible, it is fine if the non breaking space tags are displayed as such, without conversion. — ComputerLocus, Jun 19 '13 at 18:16
That makes me think it IS an encoding issue, since any html tags inside a `` should display the text and not render as a page element. — musicnothing, Jun 19 '13 at 18:18
Have a look at this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1461907/html-encoding-issues-character-showing-up-instead-of-nbsp — musicnothing, Jun 19 '13 at 18:20
@AlexMorrise But I do have the encoding set in the document `` — ComputerLocus, Jun 19 '13 at 18:24

score 1 · Answer 1 · 2013-06-19T18:32:22.883

1

Try passing your output through the html_entity_decode() function in PHP. That should convert all the &nbsp html entities to spaces

edited Jun 19 '13 at 18:32

answered Jun 19 '13 at 18:22

Using this the characters now look like this: `�`. Not sure how this is displaying for you, but for me it appears to be a symbol with a black background, with a white question mark in the middle. This is not correct. – ComputerLocus Jun 19 '13 at 18:27
@Fogest try `html_entity_decode()` instead. Let me know how it goes – Jun 19 '13 at 18:30
Nope, I now get `Â ` again. – ComputerLocus Jun 19 '13 at 18:37
That's quite strange. Sorry I couldn't help. I'll continue to look into it – Jun 19 '13 at 18:42
If it is worth mentioning, previously the encoding was us-acsii. – ComputerLocus Jun 19 '13 at 18:51

score -1 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 19 '13 at 18:26

-1

You should use htmlspecialchars on your input before putting it into the textarea.

edited Jun 19 '13 at 18:26

musicnothing

3,977
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answered Jun 19 '13 at 18:07

Peter Pivarc

469
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That would ensure that it came through to the page as literally " " and not as a space. – musicnothing Jun 19 '13 at 18:09
well, in the first paragraph author asked to look like " " - sorry I didn't know he was thinking " " – Peter Pivarc Jun 19 '13 at 18:22

Non-breaking spaces displaying incorrectly in textareas (weird unicode)

2 Answers2