Firefox 'funny' characters ?

[Sysman]

The funny accented A's are just fancy curly opening/closing single or double quotes in this case.

It's CUKs' content management editor at fault I think. It should translate non-standard characters into HTML entities.

A copy and paste from an OpenOffice document (yes, even a spreadsheet!) will do that. OpenOffice* will silently convert quotes and dashes to the fancy typographical versions by default. That might be OK in a word processing document but it's bloody criminal in a spreadsheet whose contents may be heading for a database.

I wouldn't be surprised if Word does the same, but I don't think Excel does.


* I still haven't get used to seeing Oracle on the startup splash screen.

[Platypus]

* I still haven't get used to seeing Oracle on the startup splash screen.

That's more than I could stomach

[Sysman]

On many web sites that host news articles these will have trundled through several steps, being parsed and converted at each hop. So there's a fair chance some developer along the line will assume text is UTF-8 when it isn't, or vice versa. One often sees munged characters even on sites like the BBC and the Telegraph. (Well, no surprise with the last, as they've probably sacked most of their developers, but you'd expect the BBC to be a bit more savvy.)

Yep, saw some weirdness the other day on the Beeb's iPlayer "Play" page.

[Sysman]

That's more than I could stomach

I've long been aware of what might happen to MySQL under Oracle's ownership, but to see it in OOo is still a shock.

I wish Apple would give their Numbers spreadsheet a serious boost. It's fine for the occasional user, but really doesn't cut the mustard for serious business style number crunching.

[xoggoth]

But I've been seeing this for years on FF.
And I just had a quick peek using IE8 - same thing!

Before 8 IE was very forgiving of all sorts of things that were not in the "standards" (actually the way browsers should be in my opinion unless there's some important securtity consideration). You could even get away with .Width instead of .width in jscript. All the browsers can seem inconsistent, why does " in HTML show ok but ' doesn't?

[Platypus]

Before 8 IE was very forgiving of all sorts of things that were not in the "standards" (actually the way browsers should be in my opinion unless there's some important securtity consideration). You could even get away with .Width instead of .width in jscript. All the browsers can seem inconsistent, why does " in HTML show ok but ' doesn't?

I think that ' does show ok in HTML, but ‘ and ’ (the curly varieties) do not.

[NickFitz]

I think that ' does show ok in HTML, but ‘ and ’ (the curly varieties) do not.

It's not HTML, it's a separate issue. Browsers will display curly quotes in HTML perfectly well (whether as entities or just the raw characters like “”) - in fact, they can happily manage things like umbrellas ☂ and sunshine ☀ if you have a suitable font installed. It's just down to the fact that the ‘’ in the XML feed I'm grabbing are encoded as 0x91 and 0x92 respectively, which is the ISO-8859-1 encoding, but are being parsed into UTF-8, which converts (e.g. ‘) to the multibyte representation 0xc2 0x91, which is what gets stored in the database. Then, when it's spat out by the forum software, the browser is being told that it's receiving ISO-8859-1 - and in that character encoding, 0xc2 is Â, so you see that character followed by the left single curly quote you were supposed to be getting all along.