Weird characters�?

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DesigntheWorld

New Member
Okay so now I AM in a real PICKLE! and don't laugh..lol

The problem:
Everything was sort of okay with my website until....all my Japanese characters(which were once displaying fine in DW and online) started to display as this "???????" there are also little boxes showing up at the end of the English sentences and in some areas where there were spaces they have been replaced by this culprit "�" <--OMG what is that thing?!? :eek:
I also noticed that the Japanese characters have been replaced by
numbers and characters like this --> &-g-t , &-#-1-2-3-6-2-, &-#-1-2-3-8-5 (I placed dashes in between them so they could display as I seem them in the html in DW.

What in the world happened? My site is a mess!​


Info about my site:
My site has English and Japanese characters and they have been displaying fine for the past couple of weeks that I have been working on the site. It is set to utf-8.

Suspicion:
The problem seem to have occurred after I started "finding and replacing" certain codes inside of Dreamweaver...that or after I validated the site within DW...is that possible? I dunno, but it seems like a problem with how DW is displaying the characters, that or I think I pressed some strange button or something for that to happen.


What I've done so far to fix the problem:
1. I cried and then I cried some more....
2. I checked to make sure the character encoding is still utf-8 and it is.
3. I checked that the file themselves are saved correctly without BOM.
4. I reset my DW workspace to it's original settings, just incase I changed something by mistake.
5. I made sure my browsers are using the utf-8 encoding. (although it seems this problem started in DW's end, or my end)

That is all I can think of...What is going on? Anyone?:confused:
 
Last edited:
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DesigntheWorld

New Member
Not sure..

First of all thank you chrishirst for trying to help!

I have googled up and down on how to check what the document is saved as so I tried opening one of the pages that is messed up in notepad since I read somewhere that you can check it's encoding there, all I know is that it is not a .txt file, but I don't know how to find out what it's encoding is.

I also read up on what ascii is, but don't know if it's in that mode.

All this is very strange to me since I haven't made any changes to the file extensions or encoding.Everything was fine in DW and online and then "Surpriiiise!, your characters are now going to suck!" lol.

Here are the first few lines of my template:
HTML: 
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<meta name="Description" content="Simple & understandable Japanese lessons for beginners.">
<meta name="Keywords" content="free japanese lessons, japanese language, beginner japanese lessons">
<meta name="author" content="GPaz">



------------Don't know if this helps, but this is a screenshot of when I try opening the phrases_pg1.html in notepad.



ImageShack.us



Thanks and sorry for my newbieness.
 
chrishirst

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
I also read up on what ascii is, but don't know if it's in that mode.
Click to expand...
ASCII mode is one of two modes for FTP uploading. ASCII and Binary.

Text files should use ASCII mode so the server can write the file headers correctly otherwise you can end up with some odd results.
 
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DesigntheWorld

New Member
Update on characters issue.

I have since figured out that all my pages are saved as doctype html5 with the encoding set to utf-8 , and all have the correct meta charset (utf-8) to go with it.


After not being able to pinpoint what the problem was I had no choice but to delete all the symbols from each page and continue working on 'em hoping that the problem doesn't happen again. (I used the DW find and replace to save time).
Now DW magically accepts and displays the Japanese characters correctly within DW code and design view. (As well as displaying fine in all browsers)


Could it have been some bug? Although I no longer have an issue using Japanese within DW I would like to know what could've gone wrong so that I may fix it, if need be.

I have another question to post related to this subject but I will post it as a seperate thread because I think it is a good question on it's own.(Atleast for other newbies like me :)


Thanks Chrishirst and sorry for the late update. Gracias!
 
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