Why does a diamond with a questionmark in it � appear in my HTML?

Question

I have an unorder list, and � often (but not always!) appears where I have have two spaces between characters. What is causing this, and how do I prevent it?

Answer 1

This specific character � is usually the sign of an invalid (non-UTF-8) character showing up in an output (like a page) that has been declared to be UTF-8. It happens often when

• a database connection is not UTF-8 encoded (even if the tables are)

• a HTML or script source file is stored in the wrong encoding (e.g. Windows-1252 instead of UTF-8) - make sure it's saved as a UTF-8 file. The setting is often in the "Save as..." dialog.

• an online source (like a widget or a RSS feed) is fetched that isn't serving UTF-8