Why is this the extended ascii character (â, é, etc) getting replaced with <?> characters?

Question

Why is this the extended ascii character (â, é, etc) getting replaced with characters?

I attached a pic... but I am using PHP to pull the data from MySQL,

Answer 1

That's what the browser does when it doesn't know the encoding to use for a character. Make sure you specify the encoding type of the text you send to the client either in headers or markup meta.

In HTML:

In PHP (before any other content is sent to the client):

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

I'm assuming you'll want UTF-8 encoding. If your site uses another encoding for text, then you should replace UTF-8 with the encoding you're using.

One thing to note about using HTML to specify the encoding is that the browser will restart rendering a page once it sees the Content-Type meta tag, so you should include the tag immediately after the tag in your page so the browser doesn't do any more extra processing than it needs.

Another common charset is "iso-8859-1" (Basic Latin), which you may want to use instead of UTF-8. You can find more detailed info from this awesome article on character encodings and the web. You can also get an exhaustive list of character encodings here if you need a specific type.

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If nothing else works, another (rare) possibility is that you may not have a font installed on your computer with the characters needed to display the page. I've tried repeating your results on my own server and had no luck, possibly because I have a lot of fonts installed on my machine so the browser can always substitute unavailable characters from one font with another font.

What I did notice by investigating further is that if text is sent in an encoding different than the encoding the browser reports as, Unicode characters can render unexpectedly. To work around this, I used the HTML character entity representation of special characters, so â becomes â in my HTML and é becomes é. Once I did this, no matter what encoding I reported as, my characters rendered correctly.

Obviously you don't want to modify your database to HTML encode Unicode characters. Your best option if you must do this is to use a PHP function, htmlentities(). You should use this function on any data-driven text you expect to have Unicode characters in. This may be annoying to do, but if specifying the encoding doesn't help, this is a good last resort for forcing Unicode characters to work.