Funny Character Appearing in my WordPress Pages Content

Question

Hi,

Can people assist as to why I am getting the following special character � in my WordPress content pages.

Not sure how it got in there.

Any help would be great.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The browser renders this character when the bytes in the page don't match any valid character of the charset/encoding of the page.

For example, "ö" (hex 0xf6 or ö) is a valid character in ISO-8859-1 (Iso Latin 1) but not in UTF-8; for UTF-8, it must be encoded as two bytes.

To find out what the character really is, look for the "encoding" or "charset" menu and switch to a different one until the character becomes readable. Now you know what it was originally. Then check the source. The usual problem is that a program reads the data in the wrong encoding and then mangles the byte stream.

This can happen when you open the text of the page in an editor and save it with the wrong charset or when the underlying database thinks you send UTF-8 when you actually send ISO-Latin-1, etc.