# Why suddenly the question marks?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/why-suddenly-the-question-marks/88959>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [March 15, 2007, 10:24pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/why-suddenly-the-question-marks/88959 "2007-03-15T22:24:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![dorelal](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/3da27b/32.png) [@dorelal](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dorelal)\
**Post date:** [March 15, 2007, 10:24pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/why-suddenly-the-question-marks/88959/1 "2007-03-15T22:24:42Z")

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Look at this page  
[http://eventsinindia.com/event/639](http://eventsinindia.com/event/639)

Everything looked fine sometime back. But now there are question  
marks. I find such question marks on other pages too.

What’s the root cause and what’s the fix.

Thanks

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**Author:** ![dorelal](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/3da27b/32.png) [@dorelal](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dorelal)\
**Post date:** [March 15, 2007, 11:42pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/why-suddenly-the-question-marks/88959/2 "2007-03-15T23:42:53Z")

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On Mar 15, 2007, at 5:19 PM, Neeraj K. wrote:

> Look at this page  
> [http://eventsinindia.com/event/639](http://eventsinindia.com/event/639)
> 
> Everything looked fine sometime back. But now there are question  
> marks. I find such question marks on other pages too.
> 
> What’s the root cause and what’s the fix.
> 
> Thanks

The page claims to be UTF-8, but the \225 characters are invalid in a  
UTF-8 encoding. Could the page have been updated by someone pasting  
text from a different encoding? Perhaps iso-8859-1 or similar from  
Windows?

If you’re on a browser that can force the encoding, set it to ISO  
Latin 1 and you’ll see those are text bullets (which makes sense when  
you view the formatting of the page source. (For example, in Safari  
View-\>TextEncoding-\>Western(ISOLatin1) makes the page look OK.)

-Rob

Rob B. [http://agileconsultingllc.com](http://agileconsultingllc.com)  
removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dorelal](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/3da27b/32.png) [@dorelal](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dorelal)\
**Post date:** [March 15, 2007, 11:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/why-suddenly-the-question-marks/88959/3 "2007-03-15T23:53:55Z")

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Hi Rob,

Thanks for the quick response and I would look into your answer in more  
detail.

I must confess that I don’t get all this encoding issue. Is there a  
resource ( paid or unpaid) which could discuss this UTF-8 encoding etc  
in greatet detail. I guess an oreilly shortcut on something like this  
would be useful to me.

Anyway I will continue to investigate this issue and will try to educate  
myself.

Thanks

- Raj

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dorelal](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/3da27b/32.png) [@dorelal](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dorelal)\
**Post date:** [March 16, 2007, 12:10am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/why-suddenly-the-question-marks/88959/4 "2007-03-16T00:10:59Z")

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> I must confess that I don’t get all this encoding issue. Is there a  
> resource ( paid or unpaid) which could discuss this UTF-8 encoding etc  
> in greatet detail. I guess an oreilly shortcut on something like this  
> would be useful to me.

for starters… [The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) – Joel on Software](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html)

seemed a decent overview…

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dorelal](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/3da27b/32.png) [@dorelal](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dorelal)\
**Post date:** [March 16, 2007, 9:35am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/why-suddenly-the-question-marks/88959/5 "2007-03-16T09:35:38Z")

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It’s an encoding mismatch.

In Safari I see the question marks when the page first loads. After  
changing the text-encoding to latin-1 manually in the browser  
everything is fine.

So, the content seems to be latin-1 encoded. Your server is issuing a  
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 header though. My first  
thought would be to check the database encoding (collation) and the  
db connection encoding (database.yml).

Am 15.03.2007 um 22:19 schrieb Neeraj K.:

> >

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