Post by HugeBobDoes anyone know what causes this character to be displayed in
browsers: �? If you don't see it, it looks like a diamond with a
question mark at its center.
Most fonts do not contain a glyph for that character. My newsreader's font
does not contain it, so I had to look at your message as raw text and
decipher the Quoted Printable encoding, to see that the character is U+FFFD
REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, see
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/fffd/index.htm
The Unicode standard says that this character is "used to replace an
incoming character whose value is unknown or unrepresentable in Unicode".
Some web browsers, most importantly Firefox, seem to use this character when
a web page contains an octet sequence that does not constitute a character
in the document's declared encoding.
In practice, this character typically indicates that the document's declared
encoding is not the correct one. For example, these days it is not uncommon
to see UTF-8 encoded documents declared as ISO-8859-1 encoded, or vice
versa. In such cases, you can often turn the page into something legible by
selecting View/Encoding in your browser and making a good guess on the
encoding.
This doesn't always help. Sometimes a pages contains e.g. a mix of UTF-8
encoded data and ISO-8859-1 encoded data (I've seen this happen especially
in webmail systems).
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/