Why do symbols like apostrophes and hyphens get replaced with black diamonds on my website

Question

A website I ve made has a few problems    On one of the pages  wherever there s an apostrophe     or a dash  -   the symbol gets replaced with a weird black diamond with a question mark in the center of it  Here s what I mean   It seems this is happening all over the site wherever these symbols appear  I ve never seen this before  can anyone explain it to me   Suggestions on how to fix it would also be greatly appreciated   See http   test rfinvestments co za index php c team for a clear look at the problem

User · Accepted Answer

It s an encoding problem  You have to set the correct encoding in the HTML head via meta tag    lt meta http-equiv  Content-Type  content  text html  charset ISO-8859-1  gt    Replace  ISO-8859-1  with whatever your encoding is  e g   UTF-8    You must find out what encoding your HTML files are  If you re on an Unix system  just type file file html and it should show you the encoding  If this is not possible  you should be able to find out somewhere what encoding your editor produces

User · Answer

You need to change your text to  Plain text  before pasting into the HTML document  This looks like an error I ve had before by pasting straight from MS word    MS word and other rich text editors often place hidden or invalid chars into your code  Try using  amp mdash  for your dashes  or  amp rsquo  for apostrophes  etc   to eliminate the need for relying on your char encoding

User · Answer

Look at your actual html code and check that the weird symbols are not originating there  This issue came up when I started coding in Notepad   halfway after coding in Notepad  It seems to me that the older version of Notepad I was using may have used different encoding to Notepad s   UTF-8 encoding  After I transferred my code from Notepad to Notepad    the apostrophes got replaced with weird symbols  so I simply had to remove the symbols from my Notepad   code

User · Answer

I experienced the same problem when I copied a text that has an apostrophe from a Word document to my HTML code    To resolve the issue  all I did was deleted the particular word in my HTML and typed it directly  including the apostrophe  This action nullified the original copy and paste acton and displayed the newly typed apostrophe correctly

User · Answer

What I really don t understand with this kind of problem is that the html page I ran as a local file displayed perfectly in Chromium browser  but as soon as I uploaded it to my website  it produced this error   Even stranger  it displayed perfectly in the Vivaldi browser whether displayed from the local or remote file   Is this something to do with the way Chromium reads the character set   But why only with a remote file     I fixed the problem by retyping the text in a simple text editor and making sure the single quote mark was the one I used

User · Answer

I have the same issue in my asp net web application  I solved by this link  I just replace   with  amp rsquo  text like below and my site in browser show apostrophe without rectangle around as in question ask   Original text in html page Click the Edit button to change a field s label  width and type-ahead options  Replace text in html page Click the Edit button to change a field amp rsquo s label  width and type-ahead options

User · Answer

If you are editing HTML in Notepad you should use  Save As  and alter the default  Encoding   selection at the botom of the dialog to UTF-8  you should also include-   x000D   x000D   lt meta http-equiv  Content-Type  content  text html  charset UTF-8  gt  x000D   x000D   x000D    This un-ambiguously  sets the correct character set and informs the browser

[html] Why do symbols like apostrophes and hyphens get replaced with black diamonds on my website?

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