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Sean Brierley asked, "I got some HTML that has à in place of registered trademark symbols. I tested saving from Word and a variety of copy-paste-into-text editor
scenarios, but can't figure out how this happened. I want to help the original author fix their process so à does not show up in their html text. Anyone have any ideas how they did this? (No, there is no Norwegian or foreign language involved, it's all American English.)"
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Sean:
Check the coding choices in the browser settings. There are several settings (such as Unicode and ASCII) which specify the coding for letters, numbers, and special characters. As messages are passed across the internet through a variety of systems and servers, the default coding option can get changed. Usually all the letters and numbers stay the same, but the special characters are coded differently, resulting in the kind of changes you noted. This sometimes happens to messages to TechWr-L containing special characters, too. Australian and European codes are different than the US standard. It also used to happen to items exchanged between IBM mainframes (with EBCDIC coding) and DEC machines (which used ASCII).
Margaret Cekis, Johns Creek GA
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