Random characters appearing in place of £ and $ symbols...

[chrisnrach17]

We have a couple of news feeds on our site and also some figures with currency symbols. For some reason these symbols frequently change to other random symbols.

This happens with two different hosting companies that we use.

The hosting companies just told us it's the way their systems work and interpret the site.

any ideas?

[Boogle]

How are you displaying the figures?

Example:

£ sign = £

Are you using correct HTML entities? Try using babelPad it converts symbols etc to HTML entities for, does lots of other conversions too.

I don't want to go 100% strong on this but I don't think their systems can interpret an HTML entity incorrectly- i just don't think they understand the problem.... or more likely am i barking up the wrong tree?

[chrisnrach17]

thanks for replying so quick.

the £ sign is entered in the html as £ - not £

also, we've got some bullet points that are appearing as question marks. the bulletpoints were just created using the frontpage bulletpoints menu.

[Boogle]

OK so you need to change the £ sign to this:

£ (just copy & paste but make sure you put it in the HTML code view and not design view.)

please don't use FrontPage for your bulletList, use this:

html:

<ul id="bulletList1">
     <li>text here</li>
     <li>text here</li>
     <li>text here</li>
</ul>

CSS:

#bulletList1
{
styles...
}

hope this helps?

Boog's

[chrisnrach17]

yeah that's been very helpful. thanks very much.

what would cause an issue like this?? it's been uploaded for over a month with no problems.

do you know what the code for a ' is - instead of typing an ' ?

[Boogle]

Yes the code for an apostraphe is:

'

it's usually the ampersand with a small denotion of the real character itself.

check out BabelPad: does all this for you

Boog's

[chrisnrach17]

do you know what causes this? It's frustrating the FrontPage allows you to enter £ symbols etc but then the page doesnt display properly when uploaded.

i guess it's time we changed to Dreamweaver - or would we face the same problem with that?

[Boogle]

Erm... it basically does it because as you enter text in design mode i don't think FrontPage automatically changes the symbol characters to HTML entities... I can't comment too much because i've never used FrontPage i'm afraid.

Dreamweaver does take care of this AFAIK, so you would be OK on there, however I urge you to go with Visual Studio instead because i'm very biased and like it lots and lots!

BIG UP THE VS CLAN!

Boog's

[ScriptMan]

Originally Posted by chrisnrach17

do you know what causes this? It's frustrating the FrontPage allows you to enter £ symbols etc but then the page doesnt display properly when uploaded.

i guess it's time we changed to Dreamweaver - or would we face the same problem with that?

I only have an older version of FP. There was never a problem if I used the insert symbol function.

One thing I will add to the previous comments is the charset declaration can affect the browser display. Sometimes if I have been working with a utf-8 charset my ' or " appear as little boxes when saved and displayed in IE7.

The advice given works about & works everytime.