mojibake

Even today, one frequently sees character encoding problems with significant frequency. Take for example this recent job post: ( Note : This is an example, not a spam job post... :-) I have recently seen that exact error on websites, in popular IM programs, and in the background graphics on CNN. My two-part question: What causes this particular, common encoding issue? As a developer, what should I do with user input to avoid common encoding issues like this one? If this question requires simplification to provide a meaningful answer, assume content is entered through a web browser. What causes

I have ended up with messed up character encodings in one of our mysql columns. Typically I have √© instead of é √∂ instead of ö √≠ instead of í and so on... Fairly certain that someone here would know what happened and how to fix. UPDATE: Based on bobince's answer and since I had this data in a file I did the following #!/user/bin/env python import codecs f = codecs.open('./file.csv', 'r', 'utf-8') f2 = codecs.open('./file-fixed.csv', 'w', 'utf-8') for line in f: f2.write(line.encode('macroman').decode('utf-8')), after which load data infile 'file-fixed.csv' into table list1 fields terminated

My page often shows things like ë, Ã, ì, ù, à in place of normal characters. I use utf8 for header page and MySQL encode. How does this happen? These are utf-8 encoded characters. Use utf8_decode() to convert them to normal ISO-8859-1 characters. If you see those characters you probably just didn’t specify the character encoding properly . Because those characters are the result when an UTF-8 multi-byte string is interpreted with a single-byte encoding like ISO 8859-1 or Windows-1252 . In this case ë could be encoded with 0xC3 0xAB that represents the Unicode character ë (U+00EB) in UTF-8.

I've tried converting the text to or from utf8, which didn't seem to help. I'm getting: "It’s Getting the Best of Me" It should be: "It’s Getting the Best of Me" I'm getting this data from this url. Matthew To convert to HTML entities: <?php echo mb_convert_encoding( file_get_contents('http://www.tvrage.com/quickinfo.php?show=Surviver&ep=20x02&exact=0'), "HTML-ENTITIES", "UTF-8" ); ?> See docs for mb_convert_encoding for more encoding options. Make sure your html header specifies utf8 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> That usually does the trick for me

I downloaded my Facebook messenger data (in your Facebook account, go to settings, then to Your Facebook information , then Download your information , then create a file with at least the Messages box checked) to do some cool statistics However there is a small problem with encoding. I'm not sure, but it looks like Facebook used bad encoding for this data. When I open it with text editor I see something like this: Rados\u00c5\u0082aw . When I try to open it with python (UTF-8) I get RadosÅ\x82aw . However I should get: Radosław . My python script: text = open(os.path.join(subdir, file),