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Is there somewhere on the internet where I can find a list of characters like this: †and then there conversion to standard text? I'm having difficulty finding any information about this on the internet because i don't know the proper name for these characters

somejkuser
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  • You're having a problem with Unicode being interpreted as an ASCII character set such as ISO-8859-1. It's called a character encoding problem. – JAL Nov 20 '13 at 01:21
  • http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2477452/a-showing-in-page-in-place-of-this – JAL Nov 20 '13 at 01:23

3 Answers3

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The characters in your question indicate an encoding error. Make sure your HTML document is set to UTF-8:

HTML5:

<meta charset="utf-8">

HTML <5

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

You might find http://www.utf8-chartable.de/ a good source for all UTF-8 characters.

Joren
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  • This is good information but I need to know what to convert it to. For example, what does `â€` actually convert to so I can do a string replace? Setting the headers as UTF-8 is not working – somejkuser Nov 20 '13 at 01:23
  • Make sure that the field within the database is also UTF-8 encoded. Here is a link to a cheatsheet: http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/html-character-entities-cheat-sheet/ –  Nov 20 '13 at 01:30
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You want to use the utf8_encode and utf8_decode functions. In case the source of the mangled data is a MySQL database, issue a mysqli set_charset("utf8"), this will help.

Skynet
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You might want to check out this link, it's a link of all the different characters and their names: http://www.fileformat.info/info/charset/UTF-8/list.htm

Although this isn't exactly what you want, it give syou an idea of what you're looking at when you see them. It doesn't include translations though because those are dependent on the type of encoding being done.

It looks like if you're using PHP, you're probably dealing with encodings, so it would depend on if you're encoding characters with UTF-8, US-ASCII, etc. Learn about encodings here: http://php.net/manual/en/xml.encoding.php

Also, check out this link for some tips on how to avoid seeing these characters (if you are indeed seeing them by error): http://webmonkeyuk.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/how-to-avoid-character-encoding-problems-in-php/

Hope this helps!