I've got a legacy app just starting to misbehave, for whatever reason I'm not sure. It generates a bunch of HTML that gets turned into PDF reports by ActivePDF.
The process works like this:
Pull an HTML template from a DB with tokens in it to be replaced (e.g. "~CompanyName~", "~CustomerName~", etc.)
Replace the tokens with real data
Tidy the HTML with a simple regex function that property formats HTML tag attribute values (ensures quotation marks, etc, since ActivePDF's rendering engine hates anything but single quotes around attribute values)
Send off the HTML to a web service that creates the PDF.
Somewhere in that mess, the non-breaking spaces from the HTML template (the s) are encoding as ISO-8859-1 so that they show up incorrectly as an "Â" character when viewing the document in a browser (FireFox). ActivePDF pukes on these non-UTF8 characters.
My question: since I don't know where the problem stems from and don't have time to investigate it, is there an easy way to re-encode or find-and-replace the bad characters? I've tried sending it through this little function I threw together, but it turns it all into gobbledegook doesn't change anything.
Private Shared Function ConvertToUTF8(ByVal html As String) As String
Dim isoEncoding As Encoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1")
Dim source As Byte() = isoEncoding.GetBytes(html)
Return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(Encoding.Convert(isoEncoding, Encoding.UTF8, source))
End Function
Any ideas?
EDIT:
I'm getting by with this for now, though it hardly seems like a good solution:
Private Shared Function ReplaceNonASCIIChars(ByVal html As String) As String
Return Regex.Replace(html, "[^\u0000-\u007F]", " ")
End Function
Somewhere in that mess, the non-breaking spaces from the HTML template (the s) are encoding as ISO-8859-1 so that they show up incorrectly as an "Â" character
That'd be encoding to UTF-8 then, not ISO-8859-1. The non-breaking space character is byte 0xA0 in ISO-8859-1; when encoded to UTF-8 it'd be 0xC2,0xA0, which, if you (incorrectly) view it as ISO-8859-1 comes out as "Â ". That includes a trailing nbsp which you might not be noticing; if that byte isn't there, then something else has mauled your document and we need to see further up to find out what.
What's the regexp, how does the templating work? There would seem to be a proper HTML parser involved somewhere if your strings are (correctly) being turned into U+00A0 NON-BREAKING SPACE characters. If so, you could just process your template natively in the DOM, and ask it to serialise using the ASCII encoding to keep non-ASCII characters as character references. That would also stop you having to do regex post-processing on the HTML itself, which is always a highly dodgy business.
Well anyway, for now you can add one of the following to your document's <head> and see if that makes it look right in the browser:
for HTML4: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
for HTML5: <meta charset="utf-8">
If you've done that, then any remaining problem is ActivePDF's fault.
If any one had the same problem as me and the charset was already correct, simply do this:
Copy all the code inside the .html file.
Open notepad (or any basic text editor) and paste the code.
Go "File -> Save As"
Enter you file name "example.html" (Select "Save as type: All Files (.)")
Select Encoding as UTF-8
Hit Save and you can now delete your old .html file and the encoding should be fixed
Problem:
Even I was facing the problem where we were sending '£' with some string in POST request to CRM System, but when we were doing the GET call from CRM , it was returning '£' with some string content. So what we have analysed is that '£' was getting converted to '£'.
Analysis:
The glitch which we have found after doing research is that in POST call we have set HttpWebRequest ContentType as "text/xml" while in GET Call it was "text/xml; charset:utf-8".
Solution:
So as the part of solution we have included the charset:utf-8 in POST request and it works.
In my case this (a with caret) occurred in code I generated from visual studio using my own tool for generating code. It was easy to solve:
Select single spaces ( ) in the document. You should be able to see lots of single spaces that are looking different from the other single spaces, they are not selected. Select these other single spaces - they are the ones responsible for the unwanted characters in the browser. Go to Find and Replace with single space ( ). Done.
PS: It's easier to see all similar characters when you place the cursor on one or if you select it in VS2017+; I hope other IDEs may have similar features
In my case I was getting latin cross sign instead of nbsp, even that a page was correctly encoded into the UTF-8. Nothing of above helped in resolving the issue and I tried all.
In the end changing font for IE (with browser specific css) helped, I was using Helvetica-Nue as a body font changing to the Arial resolved the issue .
I was having the same sort of problem. Apparently it's simply because PHP doesn't recognise utf-8.
I was tearing my hair out at first when a '£' sign kept showing up as '£', despite it appearing ok in DreamWeaver. Eventually I remembered I had been having problems with links relative to the index file, when the pages, if viewed directly would work with slideshows, but not when used with an include (but that's beside the point. Anyway I wondered if this might be a similar problem, so instead of putting into the page that I was having problems with, I simply put it into the index.php file - problem fixed throughout.
The reason for this is PHP doesn't recognise utf-8.
Here you can check it for all Special Characters in HTML
http://www.degraeve.com/reference/specialcharacters.php
Well I got this Issue too in my few websites and all i need to do is customize the content fetler for HTML entites. before that more i delete them more i got, so just change you html fiter or parsing function for the page and it worked. Its mainly due to HTML editors in most of CMSs. the way they store parse the data caused this issue (In My case). May this would Help in your case too
Related
I'm creating a PDF with a large collection of quotes that I've imported into python with docx2python, using html=True so that they have some tags. I've done some processing to them so they only really have the bold, italics, underline, or break tags. I've sorted them and am trying to write them onto a PDF using the fpdf library, specifically the pdf.write_html(quote) method. The trouble comes with several special characters I have, so I am hoping to encode the PDF to UTF-8. To write with .write_html(), I had to create a new class as shown in their readthedocs under the .write_html() method at the very bottom of the left hand side:
from fpdf import FPDF, HTMLMixin
class htmlFPDF(FPDF, HTMLMixin):
pass
pdf = htmlFPDF()
pdf.add_page()
#set the overall PDF to utf-8 to preserve special characters
pdf.set_doc_option('core_fonts_encoding', 'utf-8')
pdf.write_html(quote) #[![a section of quote giving trouble with quotations][2]][2]
The list of quotes that I have going into the pdf all appear with their special characters and the html tags (<u> or <i>) in the debugger, but after the .write_html() step they then show up in the pdf file with mojibake, even before being saved, as seen through debugger. An example being "dayâ€ÂTMs demands", when it should be "day's demands" (the apostrophe is curled clockwise in the quote, but this textbox doesn't support).
I've tried updating the font I use by
pdf.add_font('NotoSans', '', 'NotoSans-Regular.ttf', uni=True)
pdf.set_font('NotoSans', '', size=12)
added after the .add_page() method, but this doesn't change the current font (or fix mojibake) on the PDF unless I use the more common .write(text_height, quote) method, which renders the underline/italicize tags into the PDF as text. The .write() method does preserve the special characters. I'm not trying to change the font really, but make sure that what's written onto the PDF preserves the special characters instead of mojibake them.
I've also attempted some .encode/.decode action before going into the .write_html(), as well as attempted some methods from the ftfy library. And tried adding '' to the start of each quote to no effect.
If anyone has ideas for a way to iterate through each line on the PDF that'd be terrific, since then I could use ftfy to fix the mojibake. But ideally, it would be some other html tag at the start of each quote or a way to change the font/encoding of the .write_html() method, maybe in the class declaration?
Or if I'm at a dead-end and should just split each quote on '<', use if statements to detect underlines, italicize, etc., and use the .write() method after all.
Extract docx to html works really bad with docx2python. I do this few month ago. I recommend PyDocX. docx2python are good for docx file content extracting, not converting it into a html.
I noticed on my website, http://www.cscc.org.sg/, there's this odd symbol that shows up.
It says L SEP. In the HTML Code, it display the same thing.
Can someone shows me how to remove them?
That character is U+2028 or HTML entity code
which is a kind of newline character. It's not actually supposed to be displayed. I'm guessing that either your server side scripts failed to translate it into a new line or you are using a font that displays it.
But, since we know the HTML and UNICODE vales for the character, we can add a few lines of jQuery that should get rid of the character. Right now, I'm just replacing it with an empty space in the code below. Just add this:
$(document).ready(function() {
$("body").children().each(function() {
$(this).html($(this).html().replace(/
/g," "));
});
});
This should work, though please note that I have not tested this and may not work as none of my browsers will display the character.
But if it doesn't, you can always try pasting your text block onto http://www.nousphere.net/cleanspecial.php which will remove any special characters.
Some fonts render LS as L SEP. Such a glyph is designed for unformatted presentations of the character, such as when viewing the raw characters of a file in a binary editor. In a formatted presentation, actual line spacing should be displayed instead of the glyph.
The problem is that neither the web server nor web browser are interpreting the LS as a newline. The web server could detect the LS and replace it with <br>. Such a feature would fit well with a web server that dynamically generates HTML anyway, but would add overhead and complexity to a web server that serves file contents without modification.
If a LS makes its way to the web browser, the web browser doesn't interpret it as formatting. Page formatting is based only on HTML tags. For example, LF and CR just affect formatting of the HTML source code, not the web page's formatting (except in <pre> sections). The browser could in principle interpret LS and PS (paragraph separator) as <br> and <p>, but the HTML standard doesn't tell browsers to do that. (It seems to me like it would be a good addition.)
To replace the raw LS character with the line separation that the content creator likely intended, you'll need to replace the LS characters with HTML markup such as <br>.
This is the solution for the 'strange symbol' issue.
$(document).ready(function () {
$("body").children().each(function() {
document.body.innerHTML = document.body.innerHTML.replace(/\u2028/g, ' ');
});
})
The jquery/js solutions here work to remove the character, but it broke my Revolution Slider. I ended up doing a search replace for the character on the wp_posts tabel with Better Search Replace plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-search-replace/
When you copy paste the character from a page to the plugin box, it is invisible, but it does work. Before doing DB replaces, always have a database (or full) backup ready! And be sure to uncheck the bottom checkbox to not do a dry run with the plugin.
Other ASCII codes are doing the same thing.
Just to give you some background, these codes are part of the HTML that I'm reading from WordPress blog posts. I'm porting them over to BlogEngine.NET using a little C# WinForm app I wrote. Do I need to do some kind of conversion as I port them over to BlogEngine.NET (as XML files)?
It'd sure be nice if they just displayed properly without any intervention on my part.
Here's a code fragment from one of the WordPress source pages:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="INRIX® Traffic » Taking the “E” out of your “ETA” Comments Feed" href="http://www.inrixtraffic.com/blog/2012/taking-the-e-out-of-your-eta/feed/" />
Here's the corresponding chunk of XML that's in the XML file I output during the conversion:
<title>Taking the “E” out of your “ETA”</title>
UPDATE.
Tried this, but still no dice.
writer.WriteElementString("title", string.Format("<![CDATA[{0}]]>", post.Title));
...outputs this:
<title><![CDATA[Taking the “E” out of your “ETA”]]></title>
Since the data you are getting from Wordpress is already encoded you can decode it to a regular string and then let the XMLWriter encode it properly for XML.
string input = "Taking the “E” out of your “ETA”";
string decoded = System.Net.WebUtility.HtmlDecode(input);
//decoded = Taking the "E" out of your "ETA"
This may not be very efficient, but since this sounds like a one time conversion I don' think it will be an issue.
A similar question was asked here: How can I decode HTML characters in C#?
As I pointed out in my comment above: Your problem is that your Ü gets encoded into &8220;. When you output this in the browser it displays as Ü
I don't know how your porting works, but to fix this issue, you need to make sure that the & in the ASCII codes doesn't get encoded to &
Any chance CDATA tags solve the issue? Just make sure the text is correct in the source XML file. You don't need the ampersand magic (in the source) if you use CDATA tags.
<some_tag><![CDATA[Taking the “ out of your ...]]></some_tag>
A website I've made has a few problems... On one of the pages, wherever there's an apostrophe (') or a dash (-), the symbol gets replaced with a weird black diamond with a question mark in the center of it
Here's what I mean
It seems this is happening all over the site wherever these symbols appear. I've never seen this before, can anyone explain it to me?
Suggestions on how to fix it would also be greatly appreciated.
See http://test.rfinvestments.co.za/index.php?c=team for a clear look at the problem.
It's an encoding problem. You have to set the correct encoding in the HTML head via meta tag:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
Replace "ISO-8859-1" with whatever your encoding is (e.g. 'UTF-8'). You must find out what encoding your HTML files are. If you're on an Unix system, just type file file.html and it should show you the encoding. If this is not possible, you should be able to find out somewhere what encoding your editor produces.
You need to change your text to 'Plain text' before pasting into the HTML document. This looks like an error I've had before by pasting straight from MS word.
MS word and other rich text editors often place hidden or invalid chars into your code. Try using — for your dashes, or ’ for apostrophes (etc), to eliminate the need for relying on your char encoding.
I have the same issue in my asp.net web application. I solved by this link
I just replace ' with ’ text like below and my site in browser show apostrophe without rectangle around as in question ask.
Original text in html page
Click the Edit button to change a field's label, width and type-ahead options
Replace text in html page
Click the Edit button to change a field’s label, width and type-ahead options
Look at your actual html code and check that the weird symbols are not originating there. This issue came up when I started coding in Notepad++ halfway after coding in Notepad. It seems to me that the older version of Notepad I was using may have used different encoding to Notepad's++ UTF-8 encoding. After I transferred my code from Notepad to Notepad++, the apostrophes got replaced with weird symbols, so I simply had to remove the symbols from my Notepad++ code.
If you are editing HTML in Notepad you should use "Save As" and alter the default "Encoding:" selection at the botom of the dialog to UTF-8.
you should also include-
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
This un-ambiguously sets the correct character set and informs the browser.
I experienced the same problem when I copied a text that has an apostrophe from a Word document to my HTML code.
To resolve the issue, all I did was deleted the particular word in my HTML and typed it directly, including the apostrophe. This action nullified the original copy and paste acton and displayed the newly typed apostrophe correctly
What I really don't understand with this kind of problem is that the html page I ran as a local file displayed perfectly in Chromium browser, but as soon as I uploaded it to my website, it produced this error.
Even stranger, it displayed perfectly in the Vivaldi browser whether displayed from the local or remote file.
Is this something to do with the way Chromium reads the character set? But why only with a remote file?
I fixed the problem by retyping the text in a simple text editor and making sure the single quote mark was the one I used.
I have a backup server that automatically backs up my live site, both files and database.
On the live site, the text looks fine, but when you view the mirrored version of it, it displays '?' within some of the text. This text is stored within the news database table.
Here is a screenshot of it being on the live server and of it on the mirrored server.
What could happen within the process of backing it up to the mirrored server?
The live server is Solaris, and the mirrored server is Linux Red Hat Linux 5.
The following articles will be useful:
10.3 Specifying Character Sets and Collations
10.4 Connection Character Sets and Collations
After you connect to the database, issue the following command:
SET NAMES 'utf8';
Ensure that your web page also uses the UTF-8 encoding:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
PHP also offers several functions that will be useful for conversions:
iconv
mb_convert_encoding
Edit your Apache configuration file on the "mirror" server (the server with the problem), and comment-out the following line:
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
Then restart Apache:
service httpd restart
The problem is that the "AddDefaultCharset UTF-8" line overrides the Content-Type specified in the .html files; e.g.:
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
The most common symptom is that character codes above 127 display as black diamonds with question marks on them (in Chrome, Safari or Firefox), or as little boxes (in Internet Explorer and Opera).
HTML files generated by Microsoft Word usually have many such characters, the most common one being character code 160 = 0xA0, which is equivalent to " " in the Windows-1252 encoding, and is often found between span tags, like this:
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">ááá </span>
I got here looking for a solution for JavaScript displayed in the browser and although not directly related with a database...
In my case I copied and pasted some text I found on the Internet into a JavaScript file and saved it with Windows Notepad.
When the page that uses that JavaScript file output the strings, there were question marks (like the ones shown in the question) instead of the special characters like accented letters, etc.
I opened the file using Notepad++. Right after opening the file I saw that the character encoding was set as ANSI as you can see (mouse cursor on footer) in the following screenshot:
To solve the issue, click the Encoding menu in Notepad++ and select Encode in UTF-8. You should be good to go. :)
This is going to be something to do with character encodings.
Are you sure the mirrored site has the same properties with regards to character encodings as your main server?
Depending on what sort of server you have, this may be a property of the server process itself, or it could be an environment variable.
For example, if this is a UNIX environment, perhaps try comparing LANG or LC_ALL?
See also here
Unicode or other character set characters falling through?
I have seen similar "strange" characters show up on sites I have worked on often when the text is copied from an email or some other document format (e.g. word) into a text editor. The editor can display the non ASCII characters but the browser can't. For the website, I would suggest looking up the HTML entity code for the character and inserting that instead ... or switch to more standard ones.
Your browser hasn't interpreted the encoding of the page correctly (either because you've forced it to a particular setting, or the page is set incorrectly), and thus cannot display some of the characters.
Check the character set being emitted by your mirrored server. There appears to be a difference from that to the main server -- the live site appears to be outputting Unicode, where the mirror is not. Also, it's usually a good idea to scrub Unicode characters in your incoming content and replace them with their appropriate HTML entities.
Your specific issue regards "smart quotes," "em dashes" and "en dashes." I know you can replace em dashes with — and n-dashes with – (which should be done on the input side of your database); I don't know what the correct replacement for the smart quotes would be. (I usually just replace all curly single quotes with ' and all curly double quotes with " ... Typography geeks may feel free to shoot me on sight.)
I should note that some browsers are more forgiving than others with this issue -- Internet Explorer on Windows tends to auto-magically detect and "fix" this; Firefox and most other browsers display the question marks.
I had this issue so I just took all my content, copy/pasted it into Notepad, made a new PHP file, pasted back in, re-saved and overwrote, and.. that worked!
It really was some relic of Microsoft Word editing...
I usually curse MS Word and then run the following Windows Script Host script.
// Replace with path to a file that needs cleaning
PATH = "test.html"
var go = WScript.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
var content = go.GetFile(PATH).OpenAsTextStream().ReadAll();
var out = go.CreateTextFile("clean-"+PATH, true);
// Symbols
content = content.replace(/“/g, '"');
content = content.replace(/”/g, '"');
content = content.replace(/’/g, "'");
content = content.replace(/–/g, "-");
content = content.replace(/©/g, "©");
content = content.replace(/®/g, "®");
content = content.replace(/°/g, "°");
content = content.replace(/¶/g, "<p>");
content = content.replace(/¿/g, "¿");
content = content.replace(/¡/g, '¡');
content = content.replace(/¢/g, '¢');
content = content.replace(/£/g, '£');
content = content.replace(/¥/g, '¥');
out.Write(content);