Odd textual appearance

[jeffrey]

Today, all LZ posts (even older ones) that show £ signs are instead appearing to show ÂĢ instead.
Even odder, when I type a £ sign, I can see it. It then changes to an A with a circumflex accent on top and a G with a cedilla below!
BUT when I type ÂĢ (A with a circumflex accent on top and G with a cedilla below), it emerges as even odder errors: ÂÄĒ (A with a tilde on top, A with a dieresis on top, and E with a bar on top!)
Why's that, then?

[Mrs Mug]

Today. all LZ posts (even older ones) that show £ signs are instead appearing to show ÂĢ instead.

I'm using Firefox, and everything is fine for me.

[jeffrey]

And now colons appear as letter A (lower case) with circumflex accent!

[jeffrey]

I'm using Firefox, and everything is fine for me.
On your screen does my post #1 appear with a pound sign (as typed) or with the error, in line 1?

[Mrs Mug]

On your screen does my post #1 appear with a pound sign (as typed) or with the error, in line 1?

It appears with a pound sign.

[jeffrey]

It appears with a pound sign.
And does it here?

Today, all LZ posts (even older ones) that show £ signs are instead appearing to show ÂĢ instead.

[Mrs Mug]

And does it here?

Yes. Does this £ (pound sign) appear correctly?

[jeffrey]

Yes. Does this £ (pound sign) appear correctly?
No- not a pound sign but the 'AG' version! I'm going to cry (but I have sent a plaintive enquiry to Google Chrome too).

[jeffrey]

Eureka: the £ is restored. Let joy be unconfined (she'll like that).

[Wickerman]

Ive got a good idea what causes this but my website does the same thing.

I have to store £ signs as £ in the database.

You can set the encoding in the website to be UTF-8 which removes the problem from html text, but any £ signs in select boxes comes up with the carated-A symbol.

Change it back to ISO-8859-1 and the £ signs in text become carated-A and the carated-A symbol in select boxes becomes £.

Odd.

Bear in mind that you can over-ride the page encoding in most browsers - in firefox its view-->character encoding.

[jeffrey]

I use Google Chrome (having despaired of Internet Explorer).

[mind the gap]

Ive got a good idea what causes this but my website does the same thing.

I have to store £ signs as £ in the database.

You can set the encoding in the website to be UTF-8 which removes the problem from html text, but any £ signs in select boxes comes up with the carated-A symbol.

Change it back to ISO-8859-1 and the £ signs in text become carated-A and the carated-A symbol in select boxes becomes £.

Odd.

Bear in mind that you can over-ride the page encoding in most browsers - in firefox its view-->character encoding.

Stop! Wickerman, you're doing that thing again, where you sound like a Dalek dying slowly.

Please tell us in Earthspeak. :)

[jeffrey]

Stop! Wickerman, you're doing that thing again, where you sound like a Dalek dying slowly.
Please tell us in Earthspeak.
I too have no idea what he means! One day, computer experts will learn (as solicitors have mostly learned) that writing to non-experts in accurate but technical terms is of little use to the baffled recipients.

[propco]

Let me *try* and explain in plain english:

A website has an encoding type that is sends it's pages out in.

Your browser also has an encoding type.

Sometimes the two don't play nicely together and pound signs etc get displayed incorrectly.

This site appears to use the encoding type UTF-8.

You should be able to set the same in your browser - I use firefox and the setting can be found by going to view -> character encoding.

Well, I tried...