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What the heck is this character: Â

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What the heck is this character: Â
Hi All

Merry, Merry Smile

Visitors to my site submit info through a form. Occasionally, there is a strange charater that shows up at the front of each field.

For example, here is what the user keys in:

FRED

But that once-in-a-while strange character makes it look like this:

ÂFRED

What the?

1. Where does that  come from?

2. I can't tell whether it's caused on the user side or maybe there is something strange with my script

3. Not all submissions have that  at the front of the field, only a few submissions have generated this so far.

Any ideas?

Many thanks
Smile

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Last edited by:

DogTags: Dec 13, 2005, 12:41 PM
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Re: [DogTags] What the heck is this character: Â In reply to
Hi Dog tags that looks like a Capital A ring :

Code:
Å Å

It's used in some north european languages etc.

I have been getting weird characters now and again in form submissions and thus implemented a search and destroy LOL;), no a search and replace system that picked them up and replaced them. Maybe you could do a string replace function ?

PS I nearly always seemed to get this with people that I verified all used FireFox, but that may not be a secure verdict since it only happened a few times and I was able to replicate it moving from copy and paste from Word into FireFox when the character encoding function was playing up...

Hope this helps,

John
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Re: [Jag] What the heck is this character: Â In reply to
Ah, thanks. That gives me something to go on. I'll look into this. Sure would like to nail this little bugger

Many thanks, John Smile

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Re: [Jag] What the heck is this character: Â In reply to
In Reply To:
Hi Dog tags that looks like a Capital A ring :

Code:
Å Å

Hi John

I looked into this char more, and I don't think it's an A-ring.

The symbol above it is not a ring, but a carat:

^

Any idea what that one might be?

Many thanks Smile

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Re: [Jag] What the heck is this character: Â In reply to
I think I found it:

 <font face="Symbol">&#194;</font>
http://www.alanwood.net/demos/symbol.html

 &Acirc; Latin capital letter A with circumflex
http://www.alanwood.net/demos/wgl4.html

Now, the big question is why in the world is it showing up in some of my form-submitted data?

It's driving me crazy Crazy

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Re: [DogTags] What the heck is this character: Â In reply to
Hi,
Can you have a look if it is always followed by the same character and see what the combination of that character and another might be ? Pure coincidence, I have just come across this
Code:
é
instead of é in word as data pulled from the database in a form.

Should have been République and was république

This might be your answer that an accent got muddled up when inserted into the database.

When I saw it I was thinking that they may well be what you are encountering and that the following letter might help you find an answer in Google.

Hope this helps,

John
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Re: [Jag] What the heck is this character: Â In reply to
Fascinating. I'll look around and see if I can come up with anything. It is an odd situation.

Thanks Smile

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