Ellipsis unviewable in HTML

Question

When pulling data from a MySQL database onto a web page, all ellipses (...) in the data are displayed with a � in Firefox or a square box in IE7.

Has anyone ever encountered this problem before?

Thanks.

update 1: I just changed the original ellipsis '…' with '...' (three dots) and now it works? Any idea what this could be?

Answer 1

You are probably pulling UTF-8 data from your database to a website with ISO (or other) encoding.

What is the encoding in your database and what is the header encoding for your html?

Answer 2

This is really an encoding issue but instead of trying to get around that, I suggest you use the more correct approach of encoding ellipses as `…' HTML entity.

Alternately, you could test it by choosing View > Character Encoding > in Firefox or similar in IE. Most likely you'll end up having to add:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/> 

or

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"/>