Why does this strange character encoding happen?

Question

This HTML source code:

<td class="result">'DIVIS&Atilde;O DE EDUCA&Ccedil;&Atilde;O
PR?ESCOLAR E ENSINO PRIM&Aacute;RIOO'</td>

displays as: 'DIVISÃO DE EDUCAÇÃO PR?ESCOLAR E ENSINO PRIMÁRIOO'

Yeah, these are some Portuguese characters. Why does &Atilde; stand for Ã?

Answer 1

à is an entity much like &nbsp ;

It stands for a unicode point which defines the character A with a tilde on top.

This effect is not due to any special character encoding. The entity is defined in all common encodings. Have a look at ISO-8859-1:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC%5F8859-1

Answer 2

That's just HTML character entities. Here's a whole list. Ã stands for the à character because it's a reasonable name for an A with a ~ over it ;-)