I'm working with a third-party company and I'm trying/hoping to determine the cause of a character encoding issue before I bring it up with them.
This company has a custom drag and drop editor for designing websites on their platform. Within the editor they have a Raw HTML widget that I can drag in and add my own content too. The problem is that when I copy HTML from someones old website, using the inspector tool, and paste it into this widget of theirs, all of the apostrophe's & double quotes get replaced with 'jibberish'. I also have the same issue when I try pasting the content into notepad, notepad++, sublime editors and then pasting it into their Raw HTML editor.
Here's a recording of the issue and a few examples:
https://streamable.com/phwn2
Here are the known characters that get replaced and what they get replaced
’ turns into â™
“ turns into âœ
” turns into â
+ turns into (a space)
Å turns into Ã…
" stays as "
' stays as '
Does anyone see a pattern with these characters or know what could be the cause of these characters being replaced?
The website probably has UTF-8 encoding, and the company's editor might be using something like Windows-1252 encoding. In your first example, the right single quote has UTF-8 encoding e2 80 99. When each of those bytes is read by a program using Windows-1252, you get "small latin letter a with circumflex" (e2), [undefined] 80 and "trademark" (99). I haven't checked the other transformations. If this is the problem, then you could do a workaround by first converting the copied characters to the destination encoding with iconv, before pasting into the company's editor.
Related
So this web page is rendering with these symbols and they are found throughout this website/application but on no other sites. Can anyone tell me
What this symbol is?
Why it is showing up only in one browser?
That character is U+2028 Line Separator, which is a kind of newline character. Think of it as the Unicode equivalent of HTML’s <br>.
As to why it shows up here: my guess would be that an internal database uses LSEP to not conflict with literal newlines or HTML tags (which might break the database or cause security errors), and either:
The server-side scripts that convert the database to HTML neglected to replace LSEP with <br>
Chrome just breaks standards by displaying LSEP as a printing (visible) character, or
You have a font installed that displays LSEP as a printing character that only Chrome detects. To figure out which font it is, right click on the offending text and click “Inspect”, then switch to the “Computed” tab on the right-hand panel. At the very bottom you should see a section labeled “Rendered Fonts” which will help you locate the offending font.
More information on the line separator, excerpted from the Unicode standard, Chapter 5.8, Newline Guidelines (on p. 12 of this PDF):
Line Separator and Paragraph Separator
A paragraph separator—independent of how it is encoded—is used to indicate a
separation between paragraphs. A line separator indicates where a line break
alone should occur, typically within a paragraph. For example:
This is a paragraph with a line separator at this point,
causing the word “causing” to appear on a different line, but not causing
the typical paragraph indentation, sentence breaking, line spacing, or
change in flush (right, center, or left paragraphs).
For comparison, line separators basically correspond to HTML <BR>, and
paragraph separators to older usage of HTML <P> (modern HTML delimits
paragraphs by enclosing them in <P>...</P>). In word processors, paragraph
separators are usually entered using a keyboard RETURN or ENTER; line
separators are usually entered using a modified RETURN or ENTER, such as
SHIFT-ENTER.
A record separator is used to separate records. For example, when exchanging
tabular data, a common format is to tab-separate the cells and to use a CRLF
at the end of a line of cells. This function is not precisely the same as line
separation, but the same characters are often used.
Traditionally, NLF started out as a line separator (and sometimes record
separator). It is still used as a line separator in simple text editors such as
program editors. As platforms and programs started to handle word processing
with automatic line-wrap, these characters were reinterpreted to stand for
paragraph separators. For example, even such simple programs as the Windows
Notepad program and the Mac SimpleText program interpret their platform’s NLF
as a paragraph separator, not a line separator. Once NLF was reinterpreted to
stand for a paragraph separator, in some cases another control character was
pressed into service as a line separator. For example, vertical tabulation VT
is used in Microsoft Word. However, the choice of character for line separator
is even less standardized than the choice of character for NLF. Many Internet
protocols and a lot of existing text treat NLF as a line separator, so an
implementer cannot simply treat NLF as a paragraph separator in all
circumstances.
Further reading:
Unicode Technical Report #13: Newline Guidelines
General Punctuation (U+2000–U+206F) chart PDF
SE: Why are there so many spaces and line breaks in Unicode?
SO: What is unicode character 2028 (LS / Line Separator) used for?
U+2028 on codepoints.net A misprint here says that U+2028 was added in v. 1.1 of the Unicode standard, which is false — it was added in 1.0
I found that in WordPress the easiest way to remove "L SEP" and "P SEP" characters is to execute this two SQL queries:
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, UNHEX('e280a9'), '')
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, UNHEX('e280a8'), '')
The javascript way (mentioned in some of the answers) can break some things (in my case some modal windows stopped working).
You can use this tool...
http://www.nousphere.net/cleanspecial.php
...to remove all the special characters that Chrome displays.
Steps:
Paste your HTML and Clean using HTML option.
You can manually delete the characters in the editor on this page and see the result.
Paste back your HTML in file and save :)
I recently ran into this issue, tried a number of fixes but ultimately I had to paste the text into VIM and there was an extra space I had to delete. I tried a number of HTML cleaners but none of them worked, VIM was the key!
9999years answers is great.
In case you use Symfony with Twig template I would recommend to check for an empty Twig block. In my case it was an empty Twig block with an invisible char inside.
The LSEP char was only displayed on certain device / browser.
On the other I had a blank space above the header and I could not see any invisible char.
I had to inspect the GET request to see that the value 1f18 was before the open html tag.
Once I removed an empty Twig block it was gone.
hope this can help someone one day ...
My problem was similar, it was "PSEP" or "P SEP". Similar issue, an invisible character in my file.
I replaced \x{2029} with a normal space. Fixed. This problem only appeared on Windows Chrome. Not on my Mac.
I agree with #Kapil Bathija - Basically you can copy & paste your HTML code into http://www.nousphere.net/cleanspecial.php and convert it.
Then it will convert the special characters for you - Just remove the spaces in between the words and you will realize you have to press backspace 2x meaning there is an invalid character that can't be translated.
I had the same issue and it worked just fine afterwards.
You can also copy the text, paste it into a HTML editor such as Coda, remove the linebreak, copy it and paste it back into your site.
Video here: https://www.loom.com/share/501498afa7594d95a18382f1188f33ce
Looks like my client pasted HTML into Wordpress after initially creating it with MS-Word. Even deleting the and visible spaces did not fix the issue. The extended characters became visible in vi/vim.
If you don't have vi/vim available, try highlighting from 2 chars before the LSEP to 2 chars after the LSEP; delete that chunk, and re-type the correct characters.
Our MFC application uses Multi Byte Character Set (MBCS). OS is Windows 7.
We could type in Chinese Simplified characters by virtual keyboard, but copy pasting Chinese characters from Google Translate to an edit box in the application shows junk characters "????"
Is this a known issue with MBCS applications? Is there a workaround?
When copying and pasting into a multi-byte app the Unicode characters will be converted into the local code page. If they can't be converted you'll get ?. You really should be compiling and distributing your app in Unicode otherwise you'll be fighting these sorts of issues all the time.
If you can't re-compile in Unicode try catching the 'Paste' action and handle the clipboard yourself. Use GetClipboardData and read the value for CF_UNICODETEXT, which will be the valid text. You'll then need to do your own conversion to the correct multi-byte format.
Whenever i Copy and paste any Below Mention CHARACTER in text Box
Below are Copied character ( test this in notepad )
…
”
‘
Below are Typed Character
...
"
'
then that was converted to Junk Character. How can i Block this .
When i Type those character from keybord then it works but when copy paste it converted to Junk.
How can i detect and delete all this character before processing because ..user dont know about this issue ..
I want to delete that character wen user press Submit button.
” and ’ are not junk characters. They are perfectly good Unicode characters (U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK and U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK). Modern applications should be capable of dealing with all Unicode characters; if you can't handle the smart quotes you probably also can't handle accents, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese or any of the other characters users are likely to want to use. You should concentrate on ensuring that your application supports Unicode, rather than trying to fix this one visible symptom.
Pasting ' and " (ASCII straight quote) characters into a text box should not turn them into non-ASCII ‘smart’ quotes. Where they typically tend to come from is Microsoft Word's misguided ‘AutoReplace’ feature, which replaces straight quotes with smart quotes as you type. This is an annoyance, but ultimately it's limited to Office and there's not really much you can do about it. Whilst you can manually replace “ and ” with " by doing a trivial string replacement (and how you do that depends on what language/environment you are talking about), you'll also be removing correct usage of those characters, and you won't be fixing all the other sad broken auto-replacements that MS Office does.
The … single-character ellipsis is a slightly different case, and arguably ‘junk’: to Unicode, U+2026 HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS is a ‘compatibility character’ which is only intended to round-trip nicely to existing encodings that include it as a separate characters. Normally three dot characters should be used instead. You can replace compatibility characters by using Unicode normalisation, in particular Normal Form KC. Again, how you access normalisation is something that depends on your programming language/environment. For example in Python, unicodedata.normalize('NFKC', u'…') gives you u'...'.
Is your vnc client / server ON, try to exit (shutdown) all vnc server / clients and try again - if your copy paste works.
I'm using HTML Tidy Online (http://infohound.net/tidy/) to tidy up some very old and messed up HTML file which contains some Hebrew characters. Whenever the page is processed by Tidy the output turns Hebrew characters into gibberish, even after changing encoding methods in the settings. Using different settings, I do manage to get the same output with the Hebrew characters as unicode entities.
I Googled around for a possible solution but found none.
I had a couple ideas in mind, but I'm not sure exactly how to approach them, if at all (maybe someone has a better solution).
I thought maybe I could (after processing the page) scan the page for unicode entities and replace them with the corresponding Hebrew characters (in a systematic way, of course).
Maybe I could take the HTML Tidy source code and modify it to output Hebrew characters appropriately. The problem with this is that I doubt I am knowledgeable enough to even get started on something like this.
I had a similar problem. Document in UTF-8, containing unicode characters. HTML Tidy turned them into HTML entities. This in HTMLTIDY.CFG fixed it:
char-encoding: utf8
input-encoding: utf8
output-encoding: utf8
Hope it helps.
The website http://infohound.net/tidy/ that you are using has a "Char encoding" clause at the bottom right. You need to choose utf-8, but first you need to make sure that the page is encoded in UTF-8 in your test editor. In Notepad++ for example, you can go to Encoding > Convert to UTF-8 without BOM.
I remember when I used to develop website in Japan - where there are three different character encodings in currency - the developers had a trick to "force" the encoding of a source file so it would always open in their IDEs in the correct encoding.
What they did was to put a comment at the top of the file containing a Japanese character that only existed in that particular character encoding - it wasn't in any of the others! This worked perfectly.
I remember this because now I have a similar, albeit Anglophone, problem.
I've got some files that MUST be ISO-8859-1 but keep opening in my editor (Bluefish 1.0.7 on Linux) as UTF-8. This isn't normally a problem EXCEPT for pound (£) symbols and whatnot. Don't get me wrong, I can fix the file and save it out again as ISO-8859-1, but I want it to always open as ISO-8859-1 in my editor.
So, are there any sort of character hacks - like I mention above - to do this? Or any other methods?
PS. Unicode advocates / evangelists needn't waste their time trying to convert me because I'm already one of them! This is a rickety older system I've inherited :-(
PPS. Please don't say "use a different editor" because I'm an old fart and set in my ways :-)
Normally, if you have a £ encoded as ISO-8859-1 (ie. a single byte 0xA3), that's not going to form part of a valid UTF-8 byte sequence, unless you're unlucky and it comes right after another top-bit-set character in such a way to make them work together as a UTF-8 sequence. (You could guard against that by putting a £ on its own at the top of the file.)
So no editor should open any such file as UTF-8; if it did, it'd lose the £ completely. If your editor does that, “use a different editor”—seriously! If your problem is that your editor is loading files that don't contain £ or any other non-ASCII character as UTF-8, causing any new £ you add to them to be saved as UTF-8 afterwards, then again, simply adding a £ character on its own to the top of the file should certainly stop that.
What you can't necessarily do is make the editor load it as ISO-8859-1 as opposed to any other character set where all single top-bit-set bytes are valid. It's only multibyte encodings like UTF-8 and Shift-JIS which you can exclude them by using byte sequences that are invalid for that encoding.
What will usually happen on Windows is that the editor will load the file using the system default code page, typically 1252 on a Western machine. (Not actually quite the same as ISO-8859-1, but close.)
Some editors have a feature where you can give them a hint what encoding to use with a comment in the first line, eg. for vim:
# vim: set fileencoding=iso-8859-1 :
The syntax will vary from editor to editor/configuration. But it's usually pretty ugly. Other controls may exist to change default encodings on a directory basis, but since we don't know what you're using...
In the long run, files stored as ISO-8859-1 or any other encoding that isn't UTF-8 need to go away and die, of course. :-)
You can put character ÿ (0xFF) in the file. It's invalid in UTF8. BBEdit on Mac correctly identifies it as ISO-8859-1. Not sure how your editor of choice will do.