Member Avatar for samaniac

Hey guys, I'm creating a website, and when I copy and paste the copyright sign to add it to the footer, i get a weird  character before the copyright sign when I test the website.
Could you please help?
Thanks

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Dani AI

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A stray character before the copyright sign is almost always a character-encoding mismatch (mojibake). The copyright sign (U+00A9) is encoded in UTF-8 as the two bytes 0xC2 0xA9. If those bytes are interpreted as ISO-8859-1 / Windows-1252, the 0xC2 byte becomes U+00C2 and appears as an extra character before U+00A9. The visible symptom usually means the bytes, the file encoding, and the browser/server charset are not aligned. (Background on mojibake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake)

A practical fix is to choose one encoding (UTF-8 is recommended) and apply it consistently: save source files as UTF-8 (preferably without a BOM), make sure the server response header declares the same charset, and include an HTML charset declaration in the document head. Example HTML declaration:

<meta charset="utf-8">

Diagnosis and quick tools: inspect the page response headers in the browser DevTools Network tab to confirm the server-sent Content-Type/charset; open the file in an editor that shows encoding (Notepad++, VS Code, etc.) and convert if needed; on Unix-like systems, convert encodings with iconv, for example:

iconv -f WINDOWS-1252 -t UTF-8 input.html -o output.html

Other causes to check: content generated by a CMS or database where connection encoding/table collation differ from output encoding, and editor-added BOMs that can introduce stray bytes. Both and pointed toward symptom-level fixes; aligning encodings end-to-end removes the root cause. For details on HTTP headers and charset handling see MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Type

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Member Avatar for Dani

Don't copy/paste the copyright sign from a word processor. That is what is causing the weird character. Instead, use the HTML code &copy;

So your HTML will look something like this:

<p>Copyright &copy; 2010</p>

Member Avatar for Kraai

To ad to csgal's post.

When you copy content from your computer (like word document), or from other webpages, to paste it in a webpage you are updating, you must remember that the caracters you are copying is already formatted to the format of whatever source you getting it from.

The webpage you are pasting it in, may not recognize some of that formatted caracters, from there the weird symbols you view in its place.

If you have to copy stuff from say a word document or email message, first remove the formatting in it, by pasting it in a plain text editor, like notepad for example, and copy it again from that plain text editor into your webpage.

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