My apologies in advance for posting this question here - but I feel
I've exhausted other avenues available/known to me and I don't know
where else to seek help. Even direction to more appropriate forums
to post such a query would be very helpful.
I'm having difficulty identifying a strange character that is being
entered by forum users through a WYSIWIG editor (tinyMCE) running on
a MS ASP site with an Access database.
The character appears as a box in IE and diamond/question mark in FF.
I've tried the following attempted fixes:
1. I've changed the charset from iso-8859-1 to UTF-8 without success.
(see http://lifewriting226.massey.ac.nz/dumpthis.asp (iso-8859-1
charset) and http://lifewriting226.massey.ac.nz/dumpthis2.asp (UTF-8 charset).
2. I've added 'accept-charset="UTF-8"' to the form - without success.
3. I've made sure that the charset meta tag comes immediately after
the head statement - no improvement.
4. I've tried to identify the chr() value of the character. However,
when I load an "infected" file into a hex viewer, 3 characters
'occupy' the space of the character - EF BF BD - but when I enter
their chr() equivalents - 239, 191, 189 - in a 'search and destroy'
operation, I cannot erase the character.
5. I've changed the WYSIWIG editor but still get the problem.
6. I've tried Experts Exchange for a solution without success.
This character seems to be mainly associated with either a space
character - if I use the spacebar to insert two spaces between a word
then one of those spaces is often 'translated' into the errant
character - or if I add a blank line between two paragraphs - the
character will appear between the p tags of the blank line that the
editor inserts.
How can I solve this problem? How can I identify the character so
that I can strip it out of the data stream before it is stored?
Thanks - Bruce
