Extended characters not appearing

4 posts by 3 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: March 18, 2013   (RSS)

By windingoak - March 13, 2013

I've looked and not found an answer for this. I'm having trouble with extended characters like é and — for WYSIWYG fields. If I insert such characters in a WYSIWYG filed using the Insert Special Character button, I see the character correctly in the field box. If I examine the character in the WYSIWYG's HTML box, I see the character again, but not the HTML entity that it probably should be, like é or —. When I look at these characters in the web page they're used in, they just show as generic holding characters (a question mark in a diamond). My pages are defined like this:

<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">

What am I doing wrong? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Steve

By gregThomas - March 14, 2013

Hi Steve,

I think this is an encoding issue, I don't think the page is being displayed in UTF-8, which is what CMS Builder encodes its content in. 

I've done some quick local testing, and this header displays special characters correctly on the page for me:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
 <head>
  <title></title>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
 </head>

Let me know if this doesn't work.

Thanks!

Greg

Greg Thomas







PHP Programmer - interactivetools.com

By windingoak - March 14, 2013

Greg,

Thanks for looking into this. I tried what you recommended but no change in the extended characters. Here are a couple of observations:

The extended character display problem seems to come from text that's been stored in the CMS Builder database. When I have text from the database and text that's already part of a page, I can see the extended characters in the text that doesn't come from the database. You can see a sample here where an em dash appears correctly in the citation but not within the "bio" text.

http://www.childrensliteraturenetwork.org/birthbios2/single-template.php?recordID=257

Also interesting is that when I view the above page in a browser (on a PC: Firefox, Chrome, and IE10), the extended characters don't appear, but if I change the character encoding on the fly in the browsers to Western ISO 8859-1, the characters all show correctly.

And, also odd, is that regardless of whether I spec UTF-8 or ISO 8859-1 in the page's code, the page always appears as UTF-8 when I check what the browsers have selected as the encoding, even though the source code reads as UTF-8.

There must be some odd interaction or overriding taking place as some point. I'll keep experimenting ...

Here's a clean page that I've stripped of most of the formatting codes and other includes:
http://www.childrensliteraturenetwork.org/birthbios2/testchar.php?recordID=257

I added a line, like below, to the top and bottom of the page--the characters show just fine, so would seem to me to be something to do with how the extended characters are stored in the CMS Builder database or how they are interpreted when extracted.

Extended characters: “ ” — © ™ é

Any further help would be appreciated.

- Steve