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I have some text coming into a database that apparently has some sort of Unicode issue. the literal text coming in is "5 mï ¿ ½ in area", which appears to be some sort of unit of measure, but I can't sort out what the meaning is in context. Searching Google shows many similar results, so this is apparently a common set of symbols.

aularon
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richardtallent
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    Yeah, it looks like an encoding mishap somewhere between someone's keyboard and your database. What is the question/problem here, so we can direct the answers appropriately? – Ben Zotto Sep 08 '10 at 21:41
  • The question is: this looks like a common enough encoding issue that I hoped somoeone would know what the *intended* characters are. I don't have an original document, just a botched database entry from another source. – richardtallent Sep 08 '10 at 21:46

2 Answers2

5

It's the Unicode replacement character, 0xFFFD (�); see also How to replace � in a string

So I guess the text used to be 5m² in area, and the ² was garbled into � before it arrived in your database.

Community
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Tim Pietzcker
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It's probably supposed to be ² to indicate "meters squared". But you have an encoding problem clearly. I don't know what the problem is because you didn't paste any code or indicate any details for context.

tenfour
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