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Browsers forum: What causes strange letters on some webpages in IE7/XP3?

by: Georgia in MS October 12, 2010 5:28 PM PDT

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What causes strange letters on some webpages in IE7/XP3?

by Georgia in MS - 10/12/10 5:28 PM

In IE7, when reading a page I see (as an example):
???Yeah, that???s what I believe

In Firefox, this is what it looks like:
?Yeah, that?s what I believe

My company requires IE7 for my work, so I cannot just use Firefox.


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Character encoding...

by John.Wilkinson Moderator - 10/13/10 2:50 PM

In Reply to: What causes strange letters on some webpages in IE7/XP3? by Georgia in MS

In short, all characters are encoded as numbers for computers to process. Unfortunately, not all programs/websites use the same character encoding, so one number may represent different characters from program to program or site to site. That can cause issues like the one you encountered when one program/website does not know which character the other program/website is referring to.

CNET is actually having problems with character encoding right now, so you'll notice that quotation marks, amongst other characters, may not appear correctly if you copy-and-paste them into the forums. The engineers are working on the problem to correct what you're seeing here, but there's little you can do regarding other websites beyond ensuring your browser's character encoding is set to UTF-8 or your localized default.

Regards,
John


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Thanks

by Georgia in MS - 10/14/10 5:37 PM

In Reply to: Character encoding... by John.Wilkinson Moderator

I see what you mean about encoding on sites. Looking at the post after I made on Cnet, it came out different than when I posted it. All the question marks were different characters - some looked like greek letters - except there were no errors at all in FF.

It just seemed strange to me the exact same words on a website would be different in IE than it was in FF. FF was perfect and IE had the strange characters.


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