# RE: Re: strange charecters after redcloth usage

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-re-strange-charecters-after-redcloth-usage/55425>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [March 21, 2006, 12:19am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-re-strange-charecters-after-redcloth-usage/55425 "2006-03-21T00:19:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![dacbo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@dacbo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dacbo)\
**Post date:** [March 21, 2006, 12:19am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-re-strange-charecters-after-redcloth-usage/55425/1 "2006-03-21T00:19:03Z")

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Charlie,

You probably don’t have a character encoding specified in your html  
code. The browser is more than likely using a default character  
encoding and when you past from your app, it is using a different one  
(probably Unicode).

Make sure your html looks something like this (or whatever standard you  
want):

Note the meta tag that sets the character encoding.

Chris

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**Author:** ![dacbo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@dacbo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dacbo)\
**Post date:** [March 21, 2006, 2:03am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-re-strange-charecters-after-redcloth-usage/55425/2 "2006-03-21T02:03:16Z")

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> 

May I ask why you recommend utf-8? Is that Ruby’s, MySQL’s, Open  
Office’s,  
or some other default? I thought the web standard if one did not specify  
anything was charset=iso-8859-1 so generally try to use that - but with  
mixed success. The main things that mess up my applications are things  
from  
Microsoft’s character sets like curly quotes.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dacbo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@dacbo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dacbo)\
**Post date:** [March 21, 2006, 5:36am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-re-strange-charecters-after-redcloth-usage/55425/3 "2006-03-21T05:36:41Z")

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The first 256 codepoints of UTF-8 are identical to ISO-8859-1, except  
for 2 that have special meaning to UTF-8. Some UTF-8 interpreters will  
recognize when these two are followed by illegal characters and process  
them as ISO-8859-1.