I was wondering how I could solve a small problem.
I was told that some people see accented and umlauted letters (such as "é" and "ë") as question marks ("?") on my website.
I come across the same thing sometimes when looking at websites which use non-English characters.
Funnily enough, the other day, I looked at a site and the apostrophy (') was also shown as a question mark.
That is a very common character usually, I would think.
I thought it had something to do with the character encoding settings, and let me also mention I use Mozilla Firefox as my browser. (Version 2.0.0.7, the latest).
Anyway, I looked in the source code of the page and saw the encoding the site used was Western (ISO-8859-1), which is exactly what my browser is set to.
Has anyone got any idea how this can be solved?
Especially how I can avoid other people seeing question marks in my design of web sites.
It might only be a minor problem, nevertheless I find it very annoying.

Two points to consider:

1. There is no way, that I am aware of, to remove the characters on a web site that are mis-behaving. The page owner needs to do what is recommended in the second part of this reply in order for the page to render correctly for user in another language.

2. utf-8 is the character set for a truly global rendering of any pages you create, including translations into Multi-byte languages like Chinese and Japanese, although there are others that benefit as well.

In order to avoid someone in another "locale" having the same problem, use utf-8 as the character set for the page. If your Text Editor ( ie: Notepad on windows ) has a problem saving your files as utf-8, get another text editor. Lots of the Freely available ones are capable of saving in utf-8. also, be certain to save the file "without BOM". If you save it "with BOM", there will be some peculiar characters one the first line of the file when the server issues the file for rendering and trust me, it is a pain to get rid of those things.

The Meta tag used is <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />.

I am not an expert, but using utf-8 and saving without Byte Order Markers (BOM) has worked extremely well for my pages and for those viewing them in another language.

Simply stated, ISO-8859-1 is not multi-language friendly, whereas utf-8 is precisely that.

Thanks for that.
I do , however, not use a text editor for making my web pages.
I use the HTML editor Coffeecup.
Can I just enter that meta tag in there without being asked about saving with or without BOM?
Ie. would that just follow the language encoding without any further hassle?
Thanks.

This post has been edited by mrdee: Oct 10 2007, 01:34 PM

Yes, you should be able to just manually insert the code jlhaslip has given you and the page should work. However, I am aware that Microsoft seems to make use of its own obscure non-standard character set sometimes, and this can cause endless headaches. Sometimes in those situations all you can do is manually enter character codes for unusual characters.

You could use Macromedia Dreamweaver to solve the problem. It is a good HTML editor. Copy the HTML code by using View Source in the browser.


Then save it as an .html file:--

Open it using Dreamweaver.

Then you can see it in correct format cause Dreamweaver can accept lots of Formats

U can also use the &****; emulator which allows to see non standard letters.

Dave