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Punctuation characters display wrong



LokitoOct 5, 2007 2:24pm
Sometimes, when using firefox, certain punctuation marks display incorrectly. For instance, apostrophes often show up as something like â€. It's most common with apostrophes, but happens with question marks too. How do I go about correcting this?

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KarolingerOct 13, 2007 9:48pm
I think it has to do with the character encoding of the page you are currently viewing. Try to change it when this happens.

Screen Capture

LokitoOct 14, 2007 6:11pm
So...what are you suggesting I do? *confused* Switch my character encoding to unicode?

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KarolingerOct 14, 2007 6:19pm
Excuse me, for not asking this before: Does it happen all the time or it happen only in some pages?

LokitoOct 14, 2007 6:41pm
Only some pages, but they're not pages that you'd expect to have character rendering problems. They're not foreign language sites, and as far as I know, all roman alphabet foreign language characters display correctly for me. I don't remember when I noticed it first, but I don't think I had the problem since I started using firefox. I think it may have happened with an update, or an extension. Would that make any sense?

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KarolingerOct 14, 2007 7:05pm
"Only some pages, but they're not pages that you'd expect to have character rendering problems. They're not foreign language sites, and as far as I know, all roman alphabet foreign language characters display correctly for me."

Some pages are encoded in different character encoding even if these are in plain English. So, that's why I suggested to change the character encoding.


"I think it may have happened with an update, or an extension. Would that make any sense?"

I don't know

LokitoOct 14, 2007 8:42pm
Alright, I see what you mean. Do you know which one is most used in web pages/the most inclusive?

Also, why, if the encoding is incompatible/problematic, does text display like, "Itâ€s a wonderful day in the neighborhood"? Most of the time only one character is wrong.

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ThlayliOct 15, 2007 9:51am
7: Lemme try to explain. Be warned, I'm not a professional. I'm greatly oversimplifying, while at the same time giving you (probably) too much information. Whee, what fun.

ASCII, which is the oldest and most basic. It only has 128 characters, and was designed for American English. It doesn't really cut it for web content, as it is missing too much punctuation and has been modified for use in other countries.

ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15 are known as Western Latin character sets. These are probably the most common on the English-speaking web. Version 15 was modified to include some recent characters, such as the euro (€).

Unicode or UTF-8 is the most complex, but is gaining in popularity due to its ability to represent characters from almost any language, including multi-byte characters like Chinese and Japanese. The first 128 characters are the same as ASCII, giving backwards compatibility.

For the most part, the alphabets overlap in these character sets. This means that things will probably be readable in the wrong character set, as long as it's related to Western Latin characters.

What doesn't overlap, even within versions of a single encoding standard, is punctuation and what are known as control codes (carriage returns, tabs, etc.)

In short, this is why you sometimes see Itâ€s instead of It's. Somewhere, a server or client (could be your browser, could be the web server) mistranslated the text, looking up a character in the wrong encoding.

For an example of how bad it can get when dealing with different languages (and not just different English character sets) check out this link. At the top, or in the title, is an example of proper encoding. The rest is garbage generated by Google, which was incorrect about the character set.

groups.google.com/group/fido7.ru.math/msg/7c986c591f8b3310 [groups.google.com/group/fido7.ru.math/msg/7c986c591f8b3310]

LokitoOct 15, 2007 10:56am
8: I know vaguely what the different encodings are for, but I don't know which one to use to minimize character errors. Is this question more profound than I previously thought? :D

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ThlayliOct 15, 2007 11:12am
In certain cases, such as that google page above, there is nothing you can do. The encodings are so scrambled that I couldn't get the page to display correctly at all.

The View>Character Encoding menu contains many options, and it won't hurt anything to just try an alternate encoding. If it really did just pick the wrong one, that might fix it. The setting will only change the display of the current page, so feel free to experiment.


Punctuation characters display wrong