I notice some of my old posts now have these mystery characters in them, that look like this: �.  Sometimes they are in the place of e’s with an accent over them - sometimes in the place of dashes or ellipses - sometimes I’m not sure what character they’re in the place of.  The posts were okay when first posted. I don’t know when these mystery characters snuck in.

Is there a way to fix this?

Thanks in advance to all for any info.

Most likely an encoding issue. Do you have a link to the site in question?

Thanks very much for your thoughts on this, Ingmar. Here’s a link to a post that has examples of this.

If it is an encoding issue, how can I correct it?

You are using “utf-8” as character encoding, and that’s a good idea, generally. In this case, however, I suspect that some of your older entries have latin-1 encoded characters. Try changing you encoding to iso-8859-1 and see if that helps.

Thanks, Ingmar. I’ll try it.  Where can I find the settings for encoding?  Searching the docs for “encoding,” I find that on this page, it says to find them in Admin > Control Panel Settings. However, on my site (EE 1.6.0), on page CP Home ›  Admin ›  System Preferences ›  Control Panel Settings, I show options for Default Control Panel Theme and for Publish Tab Behavior. I do not yet see an option for encoding.

Thanks in advance for the info.

You can set that in Admin > System Preferences > General Configuration > Default Character Set. Or you simply overwrite the {encoding} variable in your templates, for testing purposes.

Thanks. I never knew there were so many different kinds of encodings.

iso-8859-1 does not fix the mystery characters on the test page. Is there another encoding I should try?

Any recent database activity? Import/export/restore….long shot but I have overlooked it in the past as well.

No importing or exporting or restoring recently. The site’s been on Hosting Matters for several years.

Hmm…if encoding

...{encoding} variable in…

is ok the only other time I saw this was on copy paste from sites that have wrong encoding and strange chars to begin with.
Sorry Vik…I.G. has already covered few things that hit me when I saw this post…
All the best!