Comments on: What Are Those Unknown Characters in My Blog Comments?

By: WordPress Anniversary: Comment Spam Lessons « Lorelle on WordPress

WordPress Anniversary: Comment Spam Lessons « Lorelle on WordPress — Sun, 12 May 2013 05:59:51 +0000

[…] What Are Those Unknown Characters in My Blog Comments? […]

By: James

James — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 19:55:26 +0000

I had this exact problem, i talk about it in my blog here:
http://yesrss.blogspot.com/2010/03/characterset-fun.html

By: Kelvin73

Kelvin73 — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:15:22 +0000

This is an important point, for many leftists who rally to the cause of non-violent, pro-democracy, movement building, are professedly motivated by pro-democratic sentiments. ,

By: Lorelle VanFossen

Lorelle VanFossen — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 05:11:53 +0000

@ John Hoff – eVentureBiz:

Excuse me, it’s Talaxian. Don’t you recognize it when you see it!

Thanks, John!

By: John Hoff - eVentureBiz

John Hoff - eVentureBiz — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:23:54 +0000

Great. Now spammers are spamming us in Klingon!

Hello Lorelle. Been reading your blog lately. Thanks for all the great info!

By: Lorelle VanFossen

Lorelle VanFossen — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:23:34 +0000

@ harknell:

Yes, those are more reasons. The strange characters you are seeing in the image I’ve included in the article are from this WordPress.com blog, on the hottest and most up-to-date servers in the world by Layered Technologies. It’s my browser not converting the character set. Once I have those languages in my browser, they will convert.

By: harknell

harknell — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:42:04 +0000

As a side note: In some cases the weird symbols ARE on the server and are not a browser language issue. This is mostly true in cases where you have a very old site and used a non UTF-8 encoding for your database (such as the default Swedish language used by MySQL if you don’t assign it another type). In those cases you can end up with some funny symbols due to the language type of your database not correctly serving up characters from a different language. This typically happens when you reload a database from a backup and the language types conflict between the backup file and the server language setting.

You can also induce some weird characters on the server if you cut and paste from a Word document that has “Smart Quotes” turned on, since those characters do not have a proper encoding within the language standard and end up looking like little black boxes when displayed on your site.

By: Lorelle VanFossen

Lorelle VanFossen — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:33:17 +0000

@ Jeremy: In the past when I've added/installed (depends upon the process and operating system) languages, some do consume a bit of RAM, though negligiable on modern computers. Yes, it is just "encoding" but if the person wants to write in that language as well as read, it is a little more complex.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:21:57 +0000

Lorelle, I think you’ll a little confused on this issue. You don’t really need to “install” other languages and they don’t use extra memory. It’s just encoding and can be changed from View>Encoding. Unicode for instance should do fairly well at displaying other languages.

By: Hendry Lee

Hendry Lee — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:55:46 +0000

Hi Lorelle,

In Firefox and Flock, it is in
Tools > Options > Content > Fonts & Color
Change encoding is available in
View > Character Encoding

In IE 6
Tools > Internet Options > Languages
In IE 7
Tools > Internet Options > Appearance > Languages
To change encoding:
View > Encoding

I’m able to view this encoding without installing any language, which is Chinese Simplified (what I encounter most)