Decoding Special Characters: UTF-8, Encoding Issues & Solutions

Gustavo

26 Apr, 2025

Ever encountered a digital document, website, or piece of code that looked like gibberish, filled with strange characters instead of the intended text? This often stems from a fundamental misunderstanding between the way a computer stores text and the way it displays it.

The world of text encoding, though seemingly arcane, is the key to unlocking this mystery. It dictates how characters letters, numbers, symbols are represented by the underlying ones and zeros that computers understand. When these encodings clash, chaos ensues, transforming readable content into a jumble of unrecognizable symbols.

Phenomenon	Description	Common Symptoms	Underlying Cause	Potential Solutions
Character Encoding Errors	Mismatch between the encoding used to store text and the encoding used to display it.	Garbled text, special characters appearing as other characters (e.g., instead of a), question marks, or unexpected sequences like or .	Incorrectly specified encoding (e.g., using Windows-1252 instead of UTF-8) or misinterpretation of byte sequences.	Ensure correct encoding declaration in HTML (e.g., ). Set correct encoding in your text editor or database. Convert the text to the desired encoding. Verify server configurations for appropriate character set settings.
Mojibake	A specific type of character encoding error where characters are replaced by incorrect characters.	Character corruption, where characters are replaced with unexpected symbols.	Using a different encoding to display text than the one used to encode it.	Identify the intended encoding and ensure the displaying system uses the same encoding. Conversion of data to a consistent encoding such as UTF-8.
UTF-8 Issues	Problems stemming from the versatile UTF-8 encoding, though designed to handle a wide range of characters.	Incorrect display of accents, tildes, and other special characters; issues with non-Latin scripts.	Incorrect implementation or misunderstanding of UTF-8, often involving incorrect handling of multi-byte characters.	Validate HTML and CSS for correct encoding. Properly escape and handle special characters in programming. Use appropriate string handling functions compatible with UTF-8.
HTML Character Entities	Use of specific codes to represent characters, especially those that have special meanings in HTML.	Displaying characters properly in HTML documents, avoiding the misinterpretation of characters as markup tags.	HTML rendering of certain characters (e.g. <, >, &).	Utilize character entities (e.g. & for &). Check HTML for correct character escaping.

Character encoding isn't just about the words themselves; it's about their accurate transmission and interpretation across different systems. This becomes even more crucial when dealing with websites, databases, and software that handles data from diverse sources.

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Consider a scenario: You are working on a website and writing Javascript code for character encoding, and you need to add some text that include accents, tildes, ees, question marks, and other special characters. The characters don't appear as intended, instead, they are displayed as sequences of seemingly random characters, which start with or , the reason is, in the background, your web page is trying to display characters using a different encoding than your text uses.

Another scenario, a capital letter "A" with a circumflex appears in a string pulled from webpages, or in a string where there was previously an empty space in the original text. These inconsistencies frequently arise from the wrong text encoding given to your browser.

In the realm of languages like Portuguese, where the tilde (~) over a letter is a nasalization mark, it is crucial to handle the character encoding accurately.

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The presence of characters like "\u00c3 latin capital letter a with grave", "\u00c3 latin capital letter a with acute", "\u00c3 latin capital letter a with circumflex", "\u00c3 latin capital letter a with tilde", "\u00c3 latin capital letter a with diaeresis", "\u00c3 latin capital letter a with ring above", often signals that the intended characters are not being displayed correctly.

Moreover, "Cad\u4f7f\u3046\u4e0a\u3067\u306e\u30de\u30a6\u30b9\u8a2d\u5b9a\u306b\u3064\u3044\u3066\u8cea\u554f\u3067\u3059\u3002 \u4f7f\u7528\u74b0\u5883 tfas11 os:windows10 pro 64\u30d3\u30c3\u30c8 \u30de\u30a6\u30b9\uff1alogicool anywhere mx\uff08\u30dc\u30bf\u30f3\u8a2d\u5b9a\uff1asetpoint\uff09 \u8cea\u554f\u306ftfas\u3067\u306e\u4f5c\u56f3\u6642\u306b\u30de\u30a6\u30b9\u306e\u6a5f\u80fd\u304c\u9069\u5fdc\u3055\u308c\u3066\u3044\u306a\u3044\u306e\u3067\u3001 \u4f7f\u3048\u308b\u3088\u3046\u306b\u3059\u308b\u306b\u306f\u3069\u3046\u3059\u308c\u3070\u3044\u3044\u306e\u304b \u3054\u5b58\u5b88\u306e\u65b9\u3044\u3089\u3063\u3057\u3083\u3044\u307e\u3057\u305f\u3089\u3069\u3046\u305e\u3088\u308d\u3057\u304f\u304a", this kind of appearance is more common when there's a mix-up in encodings, leading to the garbling of text from various scripts, like Japanese in this case.

In essence, the issue arises when a byte sequence, which has a specific meaning under one encoding, is interpreted differently under another. This often causes characters to appear as a series of other letters, question marks, or unrecognizable symbols.

One of the most prevalent encodings is UTF-8. This standard, designed to represent any character from any language, is a cornerstone of modern web development. When UTF-8 is not correctly implemented, or when data is not encoded in this standard, problems arise.

The characters that we commonly see such as "\u00c3 and a are the same and are practically the same as un in under.", "When used as a letter, a has the same pronunciation as \u00e0.", "Again, just \u00e3 does not exist.", "\u00c2 is the same as \u00e3.", "Again, just \u00e2 does not exist.", should be rendered as plain text, but are displayed as garbled characters or, even worse, as question marks.

The solution to these issues often involves a few core steps:

Identify the Correct Encoding: Determine the encoding used to store the text. This may require checking the file format, database settings, or web server configurations.
Declare the Encoding: Ensure the HTML document, the database connection, or the software code declares the correct encoding. In HTML, this is done using the tag.
Convert the Text: If necessary, convert the text to the desired encoding. Many software tools and programming libraries provide functions for encoding conversion.
Handle Special Characters: Properly handle characters such as accents, tildes, and other special symbols in the software code. This may involve escaping characters or using special character encoding libraries.

Windows code page 1252 is another encoding, and has the euro symbol at 0x80, so if a different encoding is in use, that symbol will show up incorrectly.