I am aware that a problem has appeared in past posts where random characters are now appearing in the text, usually replacing apostrophes, speech marks and the like. Efforts are being made to fix this but it may take a while.
Apologies.
Richard Murphy
UPDATE: The problem has been resolved. 16,000 posts and many more comments have been corrected. Phew, might be my fair reflection on that. My thanks to Andy Moyle who keeps this site going.
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When things like this happen, I usually think it is my fault. I don’t use any proprietary software on any of my computers or my mobile phone so I usually put things like this down to incompatibility problems.
I am told this can be repaired more easily than I imagined
Work is ongoing…..
You didn’t ask for an explanation, but you can have one anyway ;=)
Characters are stored in a database, and then rendered in a browser, and at both points, something known as an “encoding” or “character set” is used. A quick look at the site’s source indicates that UTF-8 is the character set in use here, a very common one.
The cause of the problem is usually a database being restored from a backup but being imported into a new database that is not set to the correct charset. Or, perhaps the connection information in the blog software does not specify which charset to use when retrieving information. In some cases, it’s that the HTML does not specify the right charset, though that does not seem to be the case here.
The reason why apostrophes are treated specially is that they are not in the default charset – perhaps the blogging software is swapping ordinary apostrophes (‘ and “) with “smart quotes” like some word processors do. These characters (“oblique” or “curly” quotes) need an expanded charset (UTF-8) to render correctly, and they render as gibberish if the charset is wrong.
“Nice one” to the webmaster for the necessary fixing.
Thanks
I think Andy had seen the problem before
He thought it was the result of am upgrade to the background WordPress software
Anyway, it was solved! And I was relieved
I would happily recommend Andy Moyle’s services