Stray Question Marks (was: Names of a few Celtic Deities)

From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 40951
Date: 2005-10-01

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Daniel J. Milton" <dmilt1896@...>
wrote:
> Sergei's posting doesn't quite solve another problem I've been
> having: Wh?t are all these q?estion marks that have been infesting
> Cyb?list in the last few weeks? From the Greek quotation I see they
> replace some accented vowels but not all. Can someone explain just how
> to read them -- or better yet, how to use a better system?

Check the encoding with which you're viewing the web page. It should
be Latin-1 (or ISO-8859-1, or Western European) or similar. The
encoding is not specified in the web page from Yahoo (tsk! tsk!), and
your browser seems to have decided that UTF-8 (a.k.a. Unicode) is the
percentage choice. However, the coding for accented vowels in
Latin-1 is a misplaced byte in UTF-8, so a question mark is displayed.

If one uses anything but Latin-1 (which allows plain ASCII) in a
posting, one should warn readers. Note also that UTF-8 characters
sent from the Yahoo web page (e.g. by 'reply' or 'post') stand a
better than 6% chance of being corrupted when Yahoo convert
Windows-1252 'smart quotes' to their Latin-1 approximations.

Richard.