# Â characters polluting Drupal-powered website



## Thank The Cheese (Apr 16, 2008)

A client of mine is using Drupal for a website. Suddenly, Â characters are popping up wherever an apostrophe appears. I've seen this before when cutting and pasting into a text editor from a rich text format, but why has Drupal suddenly begun doing this? Even if contributors are cutting and pasting from Word, it doesn't explain why it has been fine for the last 6 months. :/

Is there an easy to to remove these buggers? And is there a way to prevent them showing up in the future? I wonder if someone has flicked on a setting somewhere that is causing them.


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## artov (Apr 18, 2008)

Try to change character encoding on your web browser. On Safari : Safari->Preferences... menu, then Appearance and Default Encoding. Most likey the website uses UTF-8, but you have Western (ISO Latin 1).


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## mdnky (Apr 19, 2008)

It shouldn't matter what you have Safari set to as default, if Drupal is putting the encoding tag in the html like it should Safari will render it based on what the site says.

Has anyone messed with the source code for the templates or the site settings recently?


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## daveeveritt (Nov 3, 2008)

I'd advise changing PHP, MySQL and your HTML headers to utf-8, then the apostrophes (and similar characters that otherwise require encoding) will appear correctly.


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