Display problem - odd characters appearing
Permalink 1 user found helpful
Please see attached screenshot to illustrate what I mean, I have just built a new site and there are  characters popping up all over the place.
When I type into a content block, blank spaces of various kinds render as  or sometimes à when published.
I have several c5 sites and have never seen this before, but my other sites are all hosted elsewhere. This problem is only happening on a new installation hosted by Easyspace (the hosting sucks, but a friend wanted an Easyspace site converted to c5 and didn't want to change hosts). The Easyspace auto-installer initially installed 5.6.0.1 but I have upgraded it to 5.6.0.2 - the issue persists.
An almost identical version of the site (same theme/templates etc) on my normal hosting appears fine. And as the screenshot demonstrates it's not only my pages that display oddly.
A quick Google search just told me "A capital A with a caret, followed by an extra space, is the UTF-8 byte sequence for a non-breaking space." I presume this is to do with what's going on but I don't know how to get rid of the As? Can anyone shed some light please??
When I type into a content block, blank spaces of various kinds render as  or sometimes à when published.
I have several c5 sites and have never seen this before, but my other sites are all hosted elsewhere. This problem is only happening on a new installation hosted by Easyspace (the hosting sucks, but a friend wanted an Easyspace site converted to c5 and didn't want to change hosts). The Easyspace auto-installer initially installed 5.6.0.1 but I have upgraded it to 5.6.0.2 - the issue persists.
An almost identical version of the site (same theme/templates etc) on my normal hosting appears fine. And as the screenshot demonstrates it's not only my pages that display oddly.
A quick Google search just told me "A capital A with a caret, followed by an extra space, is the UTF-8 byte sequence for a non-breaking space." I presume this is to do with what's going on but I don't know how to get rid of the As? Can anyone shed some light please??
Ok so suggestion #1 - my theme does have a utf-8 tag, and it validates - I wrote it, what are you suggesting :)
but the server thing sounded much more plausible because the problem appeared to be host-specific.
so I put
AddDefaultCharset utf-8
in the htaccess and bingo, all those Âs are gone like magic.
When I have time I will ask the Easyspace support people what the deal is with the server just to confirm.
Thank you SO much for the quick reply, you are a star
but the server thing sounded much more plausible because the problem appeared to be host-specific.
so I put
AddDefaultCharset utf-8
in the htaccess and bingo, all those Âs are gone like magic.
When I have time I will ask the Easyspace support people what the deal is with the server just to confirm.
Thank you SO much for the quick reply, you are a star
Awesome, happy to help, I learnt something too!
My first suggestion is to check that your theme is outputting a utf-8 meta tag.
See this for some notes on this:http://www.ccs.uottawa.ca/webmaster/templates/faq/weird-characters....
However the interesting thing that I read was that the server itself sends in the http response header a character encoding as well. Perhaps on this server the default has been set to something other than utf-8.
See this:http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4600545/trouble-with-http-header...
If this is the case, you might be able to chuck in an htaccess file (or php.ini) something like:
php_value default_charset "UTF-8"
One other thing I read is that you can check for encoding problems using the w3c validator -http://validator.w3.org/
That might shed some light on it.