Certain characters, most notable all apostrophes, are showing up as question marks (?) in my website for certain users. Normally I'd say "easy, that's a UTF-8 char encoding problem".
But here's what's odd -- the issue only appears for a few international users. On American computers the site appears 100% fine. There is no explicit internationalization being done on the site; everyone gets the same content.
I have the usual headers and meta in place:
in header:
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
in html:
<head><meta charset="utf-8"/></head>
The content is coming via Unix file system -> SOLR -> Spring Boot -> Apache
Any ideas why the same page appears differently for certain international users? My best guess is that perhaps the content is not really UTF-8 encoded and that some browsers are better than others at failing gracefully? As far as I can ascertain though the content truly is UTF-8 -- I ran tests against the raw data from the filesystem according to this
How can I be sure of the file encoding?
Even among international users though, one user has the issue on Chrome while another's Chrome is fine but only sees the problem on Safari. (Chrome and Safari are both 100% fine for me). I've personally verified that the problem does exist on their computers, but cannot reproduce it on my own. Coincidentally both verified cases are using Mac-family products (a macbook and an ipad), dunno if that's significant.
