When pulling data from a MySQL database onto a web page, all ellipsis's(...) in the data are displayed with a � in firefox or a square box in IE7.
Has anyone ever encountered this problem before?
Thanks.
update 1: I just changed the original ellipsis '…' with '...' (three dots) and now it works? Any idea what this could be?
You are probably pulling UTF-8 data from your database to a website with ISO (or other) encoding.
What is the encoding in your database and what is the header encoding for your html?
This is really an encoding issue but instead of trying to get around that, I suggest you use the more correct approach of encoding ellipses as `…' HTML entity.
Alternately, you could test it by choosing View > Character Encoding > in Firefox or similar in IE. Most likely you'll end up having to add:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
or
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"/>
It depends on the character set of your db
you could always replace them with …
I just changed the original ellipsis '…' with '...' (three dots) and now it works?
That's probably want you want to do anyway. The character U+2026 HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS is a ‘compatibility’ character, included to aid round-tripping between Unicode and old character sets such as Windows cp1252 (Western European code page) where the ellipsis exists as a character in its own right.
(The idea is that on modern systems, you just use three dots; if the font wants to make the spacing different in an ellipsis — most don't — they can provide an auto-ligature for when three dots are typed.)
all ellipsis's
ellipses :-)
in the data are displayed with a � in firefox or a square box in IE7.
Probably all your other non-ASCII characters are similarly affected; you may see similar results when ‘smart quotes’ or díäçritical marks are used.
Most likely your database has characters stored as Windows cp1252 bytes, but the final web page you're spitting them out into is UTF-8 (either by default or due to it deliberately set that way).
You can check this by going to the browser's View->Encoding menu and picking out ‘Western European’ (1252) instead of ‘UTF-8’. Whilst you could fix this by changing the encoding of the web page being produced to cp1252, it would be better to change the contents of the database so that everything was UTF-8; then all Unicode characters would be usable in your application.
Quite how you do this would depend on what language/platform you're using.