Getting rid of strange characters

Discussion in 'Software' started by Sinuhe, Feb 15, 2007.

  1. Sinuhe

    Sinuhe Private E-2

    How can I get rid of strange characters that are inserted in place of apostrophes, quotation marks, question marks etc.?
     
  2. pwillener

    pwillener MajorGeek

    Can you be a bit more specific - where do you find these strange characters?

    If it is in email messages, then most likely it is an incorrect encoding used by the sender.
     
  3. Sinuhe

    Sinuhe Private E-2

    Thanks for getting back to me.

    These "strange characters" appear in emails and websites.

    Here are some examples:

    í “ ’ “’ “

    Others include an uppercase S with a bar over it, an uppercase D with a circumflex over it.

    Thanks for any help you can give me.
     
  4. Sinuhe

    Sinuhe Private E-2

    These "strange characters" replace English punctuation marks, like apostrophes ('), quotes (") etc. The emails and websites are all in English.

    Unfortunately, when I tried to paste the characters into my post, they didn't look the same.
     
  5. Monster

    Monster Guest

    Maybe you need to set your keyboard language to American English..?

    Maybe something else needs be set to American English..?
     
  6. pwillener

    pwillener MajorGeek

    Regarding "funny characters" in emails: is it in emails that you receive or that you write yourself? If it is in received messages, can you tell us the encoding of the message, i.e. "US-ASCII", or "ISO-8859-1", or "Unicode-UTF8", etc?

    On websites: can you give us an example of a website where you see these funny characters? It is the same here; if the encoding of the website is incorrectly specified (by the webmaster, not you), then certain multibyte characters will be incorrectly displayed.
     
  7. greenknight32

    greenknight32 Sergeant

    What browser are you using? In Firefox, you can just go to View > Character Encoding and switch to the a correct encoding for the page. You can find out what that is by right-click > View Page Info.
     
  8. Sinuhe

    Sinuhe Private E-2

    When I type these "strange characters" don't appear. They only appear on the Internet or in emails from others.
     
  9. Sinuhe

    Sinuhe Private E-2

    I'm using Internet Explorer 6.0.
     
  10. Sinuhe

    Sinuhe Private E-2

    The characters appear in emails I receive. One had this encoding: Western European ISO.

    These characters sometimes appear on my Hotmail website. Encoding: Western European Windows.

    Also on this website: http://americablog.blogspot.com/index.html
    Encoding: Unicode UTF8

    Thanks for any help you can give me,
     
  11. Sinuhe

    Sinuhe Private E-2

    I don't understand. My keyboard is American English. My computer was purchased in the US. When I type an email or in Word, I don't get these "strange characters."
     
  12. pwillener

    pwillener MajorGeek

    Thank you for the website URL you posted. I cannot see any "strange" characters on that page, meaning that the problem is on your side.

    What version of Windows do you use?
     
  13. Sinuhe

    Sinuhe Private E-2

    XP Professional
     
  14. pwillener

    pwillener MajorGeek

    Hmmm... Windows XP has full Unicode support. I'm a little bit baffled by this...

    One more question: is this something that started at some point, or has this always been happening since you have Windows XP on this machine?
     
  15. Sinuhe

    Sinuhe Private E-2

    My computer came with XPro.

    These "strange characters" started appearing months after I got this computer, but I don't know when or what may have caused it. The only thing I can think of is that earlier I did try IE7.0, then reverted to IE6.0.
     
  16. bigbazza

    bigbazza R.I.P. 14/12/2011 - Good Onya Geek

    I get them occasionally also, when I cut and paste / copy / save stuff from the Net.
    They usually appear where a comma , would normally appear.
    I manually edit them out. Not much help to you, I know.:(
    FWIW, I am using XP Pro and IE6, with AOL v7 running on top of IE6. Bazza

    ===

     
  17. Sinuhe

    Sinuhe Private E-2

    Thanks for your feedback.

    I get these characters all the time. They have nothing to do with copying, cutting/pasting, saving. They replace apostrophes, quotation marks, question marks as well as commas.

    When I paste items with these characters into Word, they are replaced by the appropriate punctuation marks.
     
  18. bigbazza

    bigbazza R.I.P. 14/12/2011 - Good Onya Geek

    Then what is your problem, if they are converted OK. confused

    Bazza

    ===

     
  19. Sinuhe

    Sinuhe Private E-2

    Are you suggesting that I copy every single site on the Internet into a Word document to get rid of these characters?

    I would just like to look at email and websites without these characters.
     
  20. bigbazza

    bigbazza R.I.P. 14/12/2011 - Good Onya Geek

    Fair enough. :eek: I'll go back and stand in the corner. :D Bazza

    ===

     
  21. Sinuhe

    Sinuhe Private E-2

    I really didn't mean to corner you, Bazza. Maybe I'm the one with the "strange character."
    All the best.
    Sinuhe
     
  22. pwillener

    pwillener MajorGeek

    The problem is that they are not displayed correctly in the first place; the user must copy and paste it from the website/email into Word in order to see the original content.

    I do not understand why this is happening. If the web page/email message is correctly encoded, then why does it not display properly...? Of course, if the originator specified the wrong encoding, then I could understand. But this is a very rare thing, so I am really puzzled.
     
  23. Sinuhe

    Sinuhe Private E-2

    I seem to have solved my problem by installing the Gentium font set and selecting Japanese coding.

    Thanks for all your efforts in my behalf!

    All the best.

    Sinuhe
     
  24. pwillener

    pwillener MajorGeek

    Great - thanks for the feedback!
     

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