Problem: your site displays some accented letters or other symbols as question marks or they're replaced with weird characters.

Cause: the characters (letters, numbers, symbols) making up your page's text are not uniformly encoded in the same character set. For example, some might be in Western European (iso-8859-1) while others might be saved in Unicode (utf-8).

Solution: make sure the browser knows which character set you're using on the page, and that all characters on your page are stored using the same character set.

  1. Ensure that your charset is set correctly in language files - this will set tag in the header of your pages. We recommend using UTF-8 to achieve a greater degree of interoperability due to its widespread use.
  2. Ensure that the charset you declared in language file matches the file's encoding and save your lang file in the correct character set. For example to save file with UTF-8 charset using Dreamweaver:
    1. Open your include file in Dreamweaver
    2. Under the "Modify" menu, go to "Page Properties"
    3. In the left menu (Category), select "Title/Encoding"
    4. Then for "Encoding" choose "Unicode (UTF-8)"
    5. Re-save your include file and upload it to the web