What is causing my browser to render an asp's incorrectly?

Question

I have an asp page rendering some text from a table into html. Some of the text has the non-breaking-space   character in it (unicode U+00A0). The browser auto-detects the character encoding to be unicode, which is good, but it isn't rendering the   correctly. It is rendering them as � (the replacement character). When I change the page encoding to be "Western" instead of "Unicode", the � characters disappear.

Shouldn't the non-breaking-space be a normal character for a Unicode encoded web page to render? What is happening to cause this?

I have verified that the character stored in the database is the non-breaking-space by using SQL Server's ASCII and UNICODE functions, both return 160.

Also, when I run this code snippet String.fromCharCode(160) it returns " ", so the browser does seem to understand that character is supposed to be a space. Could the ASP be messing those characters up between querying them and writing them as html?

See this answer: [enter link description here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1609491/nbsp-not-being-displayed-properly) — Paul in Seattle, May 19 '17 at 18:56

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 22 '17 at 19:44

The asp file was saved with ANSI encoding. Switching the file's encoding to UTF-8 solved the problem. I'm guessing even though the page said it's charset was UTF-8, it really wasn't. This explains why 'Western' encoding worked while "Unicode" did not.

What is causing my browser to render an asp's incorrectly?

1 Answers1