What is causing the corruption of text fields with ¿ characters?

Question

We have a very strange problem in out application, all of a sudden we started noticing upside down question marks being saved along with other text typed in to the fields on the screen. These upside down question marks were not originally entered by the users and it is unclear where they come from. We are using Oracle 10g with Asp.Net.

Here is an example of the issue: "140, 141) ¿ 16-Oct-07". If any one have seen this before and found a way to fix this please let me know how.

Answer 1

This sounds like a character encoding issue. Please check what encoding your database (tables) are set to, and what encoding the objects or strings which are passing data in the database are of. If there is a mis-match (DB in ANSI, App in UTF-8), these sorts of issues can appear.