tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-04-21:107589 Tang's DW tangaroa tangaroa 2013-07-12T16:54:36Z tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-04-21:107589:44038 What is this garbage:  2013-07-12T16:52:59Z 2013-07-12T16:54:36Z public 0 Seen around the web, a website displays the copyright symbol as: ©<br /><br />The Unicode garbage is in the source:<br /><pre>Ã&amp;#402;â&amp;#8364;&amp;#353;Ã&amp;#8218;Â</pre><br /><br />Googling either string shows the same characters added before special characters on other websites. I wonder what causes this.<br /><br />Saving the raw HTML + xxd produces: <br /><br /><pre> c326 2334 3032 3be2 2623 3833 .&amp;#402;.&amp;#83 3634 3b26 2333 3533 3bc3 2623 3832 3138 64;&amp;#353;.&amp;#8218 3bc2 a9 ;..</pre><br /><br />Converting the HTML escape sequences produces: <br /><br /><pre>c3 0192 e2 20ac 0161 82c3 201A c2a9</pre> <br /><br />In which c3 and e2 are one-byte characters, the entities are multibyte Unicode characters, and c2a9 at the end is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description">UTF-8 representation</a> of unicode 0xa9, the copyright symbol. Looking up the entity values shows that the garbage string is being produced exactly as specified by the HTML. <br /><br />So what's going on here? People are presumably copying and pasting a symbol from some other location, most likely Word or another website, into their web browser or HTML editor. Somehow these extra characters get passed along in a way that they don't notice it and fix it. In the case of the website where I first saw this, it looks like an HTML editor translated the characters into HTML escape sequences; nobody would do that manually. I don't know what causes this or what the characters are supposed to mean.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=tangaroa&ditemid=44038" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments