5 replies to this topic

[guyrcook]

Hi,

I'm trying to add the store name with the ® symbol for registered but that won't work I get goobly-gook instead that is � instead. Very frustrating, the legal guys say that reg mark has to appear everywhere that the name appears.

Thanks in advance,

Guy Cook

[germ]

Just a guess but from what you posted you may have a BOM problem.

Read the last post in this thread

Hard to say without a URL.

[MrPhil]

How are you inserting the registered trademark symbol? Are you using ®, or are you inserting the binary character itself into the text? I'm not sure that the ampersand (&) will or won't be turned into &, negating its function.

If you are inserting the binary byte (or bytes) into some text, it's probable that your PC's encoding does not match your site's encoding (database and presented page). Are they all consistent (the same) encoding, or different? For example, if your PC that you're doing editing on is Windows Latin 1 (Windows codepage 1255?), and your site database is ISO Latin 1 and your page is UTF-8, you'll be royally screwed up.

Nothing to do with a superfluous Byte Order Mark, although that would cause other problems ("Headers already sent").

[germ]

Quote

Nothing to do with a superfluous Byte Order Mark, although that would cause other problems ("Headers already sent").

That all depends on how he's inserting the code.

Granted that shot at the problem was "way out there" but it's not totally ruled out - yet.

[MrPhil]

Those three odd characters are not the dreaded Byte Order Mark. The odd thing here is that if ® is being properly inserted into the HTML, it should be left alone until the browser actually renders the page. I'm wondering if maybe some editor is "helpfully" converting HTML entities (such as ®) into binary byte codes, and is using the wrong one for the expected encoding. The characters � are (in Latin-1/ISO-8859-1) EF BF BD. As UTF-8, that would equal U+FFFD, which is not a valid character, as far as I can tell, and certainly not the registered trademark character (U+00AE, UTF-8 C2 AE).

Guy, look in your files where you inserted the ® HTML entity, and see if some editor "helpfully" converted it to those characters. If so, use a real editor, not a word processor or WYSIWYG HTML editor, or at least find out how to shut off this feechur. If your files are clean, look at the page source in the browser (View > Page Source). It should still be ® there. Is the text in question stored in a database or in a flat file? If a database, what encoding (Latin-1 or UTF-8)? Use phpMyAdmin to browse the database and show what it thinks the character is (and whether it's converted to binary bytes or left as an HTML entity). If flat file, what character set encoding was in use on the PC that created it? In either case, does it match what your page is declared to be (ISO-8859-1, UTF-8, or something else)? Finally, did you copy the three characters correctly? The Byte Order Mark (which would likely be at the very beginning of the file, and appear on the page at the point where the file was brought in by PHP) is EF BB BF, which is i+umlaut, right double guillemet (>>), inverted question mark.

In the end, I suspect you will find that either some brain-dead editor is converting HTML entities to the (wrong encoding) binary, or you typed it in as "insert special character" (binary) and the character encoding doesn't match what your server is using. You said "®" -- is that actually what you typed in?

[germ]

When I open a UTF-8 encoded (PHP) file as ASCII I get:

<?php

Not the exact code he posted but similar.

I guess since he hasn't came back we'll never know.