We have just migrated a pile of ASP-driven content-managed websites
from Win2000/SQL7 to Win2003/SQL2000 and noticed that, on some of
them, certain characters such as the pound sign (£), 66..99 "curly
quotes" and curly apostrophes were appearing as several characters in
the HTML output unless Internet Explorer was forced into "View ->
Encoding -> Unicode"
For example, a £ appeared as "[A-grave]£" and a curly apostrophe as
something with a [TM] in the middle of it.
After much investigation into Unicode, code pages and text vs ntext
command parameters, it turned out to be something very odd with the
source code.
The ASP script is made up of several included ASP files, most
containing a class definition or simple constants.
We found that when one particular include file was removed, characters
appeared as intended.
All the code was stripped from this include file and still its
inclusion caused characters to appear incorrectly.
Eventually, we noticed the "empty" ASP file was in fact 3 bytes long
and opening it up in DOS Edit showed three symbolic characters in the
file [http://www.idaho.uk.net/20040217/funnychars.gif]. Creating a new
text file, copying the code over and replacing the original file
solved the problem of characters wrongly displaying.
These characters were not visible in Notepad, nor any other editor we
tried. We haven't a clue where they came from originally.
What do these characters mean and how can they mess up the rendering
of the page?
Stuart Newton
Idaho Technology Limited
Manchester, UK
