“’” showing on page instead of ” ‘ “

by

So what’s the problem,

It’s a ’ (RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK – U+2019) character which is being decoded as CP-1252 instead of UTF-8. If you check the encodings table, then you see that this character is in UTF-8 composed of bytes 0xE2, 0x80 and 0x99. If you check the CP-1252 code page layout, then you’ll see that each of those bytes stand for the individual characters â, € and ™.

and how can I fix it?

Use UTF-8 instead of CP-1252 to read, write, store, and display the characters.

I have the Content-Type set to UTF-8 in both my <head> tag and my HTTP headers:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

This only instructs the client which encoding to use to interpret and display the characters. This doesn’t instruct your own program which encoding to use to read, write, store, and display the characters in. The exact answer depends on the server side platform / database / programming language used. Do note that the one set in HTTP response header has precedence over the HTML meta tag. The HTML meta tag would only be used when the page is opened from local disk file system instead of from HTTP.

In addition, my browser is set to Unicode (UTF-8):

This only forces the client which encoding to use to interpret and display the characters. But the actual problem is that you’re already sending ’ (encoded in UTF-8) to the client instead of ’. The client is correctly displaying ’ using the UTF-8 encoding. If the client was misinstructed to use, for example ISO-8859-1, you would likely have seen ââ¬â¢ instead.

I am using ASP.NET 2.0 with a database.

This is most likely where your problem lies. You need to verify with an independent database tool what the data looks like.

If the ’ character is there, then you aren’t connecting to the database correctly. You need to tell the database connector to use UTF-8.

If your database contains ’, then it’s your database that’s messed up. Most probably the tables aren’t configured to use UTF-8. Instead, they use the database’s default encoding, which varies depending on the configuration. If this is your issue, then usually just altering the table to use UTF-8 is sufficient. If your database doesn’t support that, you’ll need to recreate the tables. It is good practice to set the encoding of the table when you create it.

You’re most likely using SQL Server, but here is some MySQL code (copied from this article):

CREATE DATABASE db_name CHARACTER SET utf8;
CREATE TABLE tbl_name (...) CHARACTER SET utf8;

If your table is however already UTF-8, then you need to take a step back. Who or what put the data there. That’s where the problem is. One example would be HTML form submitted values which are incorrectly encoded/decoded.

Here are some more links to learn more about the problem:

More Related Contents:

  1. Using PowerShell to write a file in UTF-8 without the BOM
  2. How do I correct the character encoding of a file?
  3. Changing default encoding of Python?
  4. What is the difference between utf8mb4 and utf8 charsets in MySQL?
  5. What are Unicode, UTF-8, and UTF-16?
  6. What is the Java’s internal represention for String? Modified UTF-8? UTF-16?
  7. How can I write a file in UTF-8 format?
  8. How can I transform string to UTF-8 in C#?
  9. How to convert a file to utf-8 in Python?
  10. How to source() .R file saved using UTF-8 encoding?
  11. What is “=C2=A0” in MIME encoded, quoted-printable text?
  12. How to write UTF-8 in a CSV file
  13. PHP json encode – Malformed UTF-8 characters, possibly incorrectly encoded [duplicate]
  14. Why doesn’t Python recognize my utf-8 encoded source file?
  15. What’s the difference between encoding and charset?
  16. File was loaded in the wrong encoding:’UTF-8′ in IntelliJ IDEA
  17. Python ascii utf unicode
  18. How do I determine file encoding in OS X?
  19. RStudio not picking the encoding I’m telling it to use when reading a file
  20. Java 8 UTF-8 encoding issue (java bug?)
  21. JVM property -Dfile.encoding=UTF8 or UTF-8?
  22. How to print UTF-8 strings to std::cout on Windows?
  23. cyrillic in windows Console(java) System.out.println();
  24. PHP messing with HTML Charset Encoding
  25. Why does this Python program send empty emails when I encode it with utf-8? [duplicate]
  26. Changing the “locale preferred encoding” in Python 3 in Windows
  27. Convert “\x” escaped string into readable string in python
  28. utf-8 special characters not displaying [duplicate]
  29. What is the most common encoding of each language?
  30. Base64 encode with Stream_StringToBinary inserts a newline, breaking the string?

Leave a Comment