UTF-8 special characters don't show up

Question

I\'m trying to figure out why characters like this : 👉 show up like empty boxes. They are unicode characters though and charset is utf-8.

Can it be a font

Answer 1

The character which you've there is the Unicode Character 'WHITE RIGHT POINTING BACKHAND INDEX' (U+1F449). On that page, you can find a list of known fonts supporting the character behind the link Fonts that support U+1F449.

Font
LastResort
Segoe UI Emoji
Segoe UI Symbol
Symbola

Neither of those fonts is been used here on stackoverflow.com, so you'll also see an empty box.

If this occurs on your own website, and you'd like to fix it, then you'd need to supply a supporting font along with the webapp by CSS @font-face, or in this particular case perhaps better, look for a CSS based icon library such as Font Awesome. The comes very close with this character.