HTML entities appear to contain nonsense - html

Question

신영 안
Above is the html, below is the code. Is this a name? What does it mean?
신옠안

Answer 1

You have a double Mojibake, data mangled by using incorrect codecs.
It's actually Korean, a name:
신영 안
or, if using HTML entities, this should have been encoded to
신영 안
It translates to English as Shin-Young An.
When encoded to UTF-8, and grouped per input code-point then displayed using hex digits you would get this:
ec 8b a0
ec 98 81
20
ec 95 88
To produce the output you have, someone must have:
Decoded the above UTF-8 data using Windows codepage 1252, producing
ì‹<A0>ì˜<81> 안
(where <A0> is the non-breaking space character, and <81> is an invalid CP1252 byte, but this is often ignored in many decoders; I've included them in this notation because they'd not otherwise be printable)
Encoded the resulting mess to UTF-8 again to give you the following byte values:
c3 ac e2 80 b9 c2 a0
c3 ac cb 9c c2 81
20
c3 ac e2 80 a2 cb 86
(the grouping matches the correct UTF-8, above)
Decoded those UTF-8 bytes a second time using the same Windows CP1252 codec, this time producing:
ì‹Â<A0>ì˜Â<81> 안
(with the same note on the <A0> and <81> characters)
Finally encoded the resulting characters to HTML entities:
신영 안
If you have Python installed, then the ftfy library can 'repair' text like this in a single step:
>>> import ftfy
>>> sample = '신영 안'
>>> ftfy.ftfy(sample)
'신영 안'
I used that library to tell me what codecs were used, as well as use it's sloppy CP1252 decoder to produce the decodes above.
E.g. for your input I used:
>>> ftfy.fixes.fix_encoding_and_explain(ftfy.fixes.unescape_html(sample))
('신영 안', [('encode', 'sloppy-windows-1252', 0), ('decode', 'utf-8', 0), ('encode', 'sloppy-windows-1252', 0), ('decode', 'utf-8', 0)])
to see the repair plan, and reversed it to explain how the Mojibake was produced in the first place.