Character/Text issue

LewieP

I recently reformatted, and now I keep seeing characters dotted over the internet that look like this:



I assume there is some character pack or something I have to download, and I must have done it so long ago I forgot about it. Suggestions?

Tofystedeth

I have that same problem. Have for several months. I'm not sure what I'm missing.

ProPatriaMori

I've been getting that too! New XP install, Firefox 3. I assumed it had something to do with that.

Now, those little boxes are for undisplayable unicode characters. The numbers inside are the hex code for the character. I went to Control Panel / Regional and Language Options / Languages, installed files for complex and east asian languages, and then checked all the code conversion pages I could under Advanced. I still see some boxes, but I don't see them everywhere.

It'll require access to an XP CD, I think. Needs to copy files.

Tofystedeth

hmm yeah, I can see Japanese and Chinese characters, but still get that a lot when googling asian stuff. guess I'll keep installing packs until they are gone. The weird thing is that a lot of times it just shows up in the middle of english text. Is that like, some non-printing character that got in somehow?

Namel3ss

Tofystedeth wrote: »

googling asian stuff :winky:

Zetx

Hm. Try changing your Character Encoding? View -> Character Encoding -> I dunno, pick one...


Sorry, not much help here.

(edit: Re: Firefox/Browsers)

embrik

Zetx wrote: »

Hm. Try changing your Character Encoding? View -> Character Encoding -> I dunno, pick one...


Sorry, not much help here.

(edit: Re: Firefox/Browsers)

That's a good idea. There are encoding settings for every browser. What are yours set to? (Meaning, the folks that are having problems)

For me, FF3 is set to Western (ISO-8859-1), and IE7 is set to Unicode. I don't have the problem you're describing w/ either browser.

Also, can you give us an example website where you see those to compare?

LewieP

this post

I tried what ProPatriaMori said, and no change.

I've tried different encoding settings to, still no change.

Zetx

I'm betting it's this character? (／)

It's unicode of some kind, so try a unicode encoding... (Though I'm using Western ISO 8859...)

Jimmy King

Changing the character encoding setting in your browser is not likely to do anything. If it does, it is either a coincidence or the web server is sending incorrect headers in the responses. Your web browser picks the character encoding based on a header that the http server sends - hopefully this is the same character encoding as the text is actually being sent in, although you'd never know if it wasn't on most sites with only standard english characters unless the encoding being specified in the header was something crazy like an arabic or asian encoding.

You can change that encoding manually if you want after the page loads, but as a general rule, when you then go load another page, it's going to go back to autodetecting. In most cases you do not permanently set a character encoding to use at all times in your web browser.

Does this happen in both ie and firefox? Have you tried other browsers to see if it's the same? Also, would it be possible for you to quote the text on that link where you have errors and put like <Bad character here> </bad character here> around where you see the bad characters? I don't see any characters on that post that shouldn't show up properly with any of the standard character sets, unless I misunderstood why you were linking to that post.

LewieP

Here's the whole post, with bad characters in red:

lowlylowlycook wrote: »

lol analysts. The very idea these people get paid for that is mind boggling.

Anyway, famitsu numbers from our lords and master at neogaf:

Wii／60,114
PSP／55,882
DSL／51,041
PS3／18,688
PS2／8,106
360／3,160

TOSR - 151,000
Daigasso! Band Brothers DX - 122,000

Fact: PS3 sprints at the Wii's marathon pace. Maybe some Wiifit could help build some endurance.

Alternate analogy: It's OK, PS3 it happens to every console from time to time. Nothing to be ashamed of.

Just tried it in IE, and instead of the boxes with numbers/letters in them, I just get empty boxes.

embrik

Okay, so the tiny letters inside the square represent the Unicode hex value of the character (in this case, FF0F).
This page says it's a Full width Solidus. Apparently, a Solidus is a forward slash (or similar number separator). I don't know which language pack might include a viewable version of this character. That page even has a "browser test page" where you can see the character if you have the appropriate font. I appreciate what it displays at the top - "You need a font that supports this character to even have a hope of seeing it correctly in the browser."

Edit: And here's a blog post about trouble with some of the stranger Unicode characters when trying to write mathematical equations on a computer.

Jimmy King

Curious. It is the / as Zetx suggested - he was apparently smarter than me and just looked at the source in the first place to see it has a crazy entity being used there. I am far from a character set/encoding expert, so I am not quite sure why it's using #65295 there, or why it's working for some of us (or me, at least) and not others. I'm pretty sure #65295 is not one of the standard iso-8859-1 characters' decimal representation, though, and it's certainly not the standard one for a /

edit: unless, of course, you somehow managed to not get something that is pretty standard installed.

Zetx

Heh, a couple math ones give me trouble here, too.

So much for Unicode, indeed.