Space are displayed as question marks

[RFH Reseller: Rappie]

Hello guys,

I’ am not sure whether this is a PHP or MySQL problem. But I'm getting lots of question marks on one of my websites. All the text/content is stored in a MySQL 5 database.

The plain text, as it is stored in de DB contains lots of spaces. Those space are being displayed as question marks. So either PHP or MySQL converts space to question marks.

Here is an example of what I mean:

http://dp4all.nl/?page=mydp&dp_action=view&id=388

Really annoying. Has it got anything to do with the charset used my MySQL?

[Staff: Warren Ashcroft]

Yes, when you use MySQL software like Query Analyser - what is displayed?

[RFH Reseller: Rappie]

Errr .. Query Analyser?
Never heard of before ... url?

I'm just using PHPmyAdmin, form what I can see in PHPmyAdmin is that
charset "utf-8" is being used.

[Staff: Warren Ashcroft]

Does PHPMyAdmin show the content of your tables fine?

[RFH Reseller: nick]

I have a feature on my text editor, BBEdit, called 'zap gremlins' which always clear these kind of things up. They normally result from copying and pasting from a non-ASCII source. I don't think the problem will be with the character sets between the database and the browser.

[Staff: Warren Ashcroft]

I have a feature on my text editor, BBEdit, called 'zap gremlins' which always clear these kind of things up. They normally result from copying and pasting from a non-ASCII source. I don't think the problem will be with the character sets between the database and the browser.

Not entirely true, its when the encoding format does not match...

However, in the case of database and website providing the data is fine in the actual database tables the problem is caused by the charset of the HTML document (as should defined in the head section) - generally UTF-8 is a decent character set to use as it covers all bases.

Many web/software developers have no clue about data/text encoding and the character sets, I highly recommend developers look into it...

http://annevankesteren.nl/2004/06/utf-8

[RFH Reseller: nick]

Not entirely true, its when the encoding format does not match...

However, in the case of database and website providing the data is fine in the actual database tables the problem is caused by the charset of the HTML document (as should defined in the head section) - generally UTF-8 is a decent character set to use as it covers all bases.

Many web/software developers have no clue about data/text encoding and the character sets, I highly recommend developers look into it...

http://annevankesteren.nl/2004/06/utf-8

Interesting read.

I think my point was that often when I encounter these kind of problems, deleting non-ascii characters is a quick way round, because they are often just 'invisible' relic characters that have been left within the text. Doing this, and then specifying an encoding like utf-8 keeps everything good. If you do require the special characters in another encoding, you obviously wouldn't want to do this, and instead would need to make the browser aware of the charset required (and hope the user's system contains them). If you see what I mean hehe.

[Staff: Warren Ashcroft]

Well if you use UTF-8 you can use the special characters from most character sets...

UTF-8 is based on Unicode which is a brave ans sucesfull attempt to stop encoding issues because Unicode is a MASSIVE table of characters from all over the world.

[RFH Reseller: nick]

Well if you use UTF-8 you can use the special characters from most character sets...

UTF-8 is based on Unicode which is a brave ans sucesfull attempt to stop encoding issues because Unicode is a MASSIVE table of characters from all over the world.

Agreed, but I did check the page, changing it to UTF-8 (I have a nifty live source code editor plugin for safari ) and the questionmarks still remain, in fact it shows up other problem characters that are fine in the current iso-8859-1 encoding.
I should really mention that the original questionmarks I am seeing are seemingly good characters - just questionmark ones, which is slightly different to the questionmark like characters inserted (like the new ones I see when changing it to utf-8) when a character is missing from the charset (don't know if this is the same in windows, but on the mac you get a white questionmark in a black diamond). This therefore suggests to me that the problem has occured prior to the browser trying to render them.

lol crikey, it's quite tough trying to describe what I mean, probably I'm not making any sense, but there is some sort of logic behind my ramblings.

[Staff: Warren Ashcroft]

Well as I said, it could be a problem with the data in the database - if its wrong there then it aint going to come out right in the HTML