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

It's a character-set issue. Get a tool that inspects the response headers of the server (like the Firebug extension if you're using Mozilla Firefox) to see what character set the server response is sending with the content. If the server's character-set and the HTML character set of the actual content don't match up, you will see some strange looking characters like those little black diamond squares.