Trouble with unwanted question marks in web pages.

**Death Slaught** · Apr 17 '08, 09:16 PM

Please post a link to your test site if you have one, and your code as well.

Thanks, Death

**chisholm** · Apr 17 '08, 09:46 PM

My web site is located at:-

http://chisholm.diinow eb.com/files/THECAUSE/MAINGATE.htm

This is the main page and is just one of many on my site with the "question marks" problem.

You can see the code just by clicking View/Source in your web browser.

I haven't edited the HTML source at all, the page was created entirely by using MS Word 2000.

If you look at it, near the top of the page just below the <head> tag you see the following:-

<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">

- Robert

**Death Slaught** · Apr 17 '08, 09:54 PM

From you're browser press "ctrl + o" and then find the .html file that the program made. You should see it. Now right click and select view source. Now you should (if you're using Internet Explorer) see the source code. The questions marks are everywhere simply backspace them out and save the document.

Thanks, Death

**chisholm** · Apr 17 '08, 10:44 PM

Many thanks for the tip.

I'll try this out and then report here what happens.

Thanks once again - Robert.

**harshmaul** · Apr 18 '08, 10:40 AM

Also i advise getting a decent web gui like dreamweaver, or if you want to stauy microsoft, they got one alled frontpage that i think comes with office. so chances are you may already have frontpage.

But my advise for you if you will be making many more is getting hold of dreamweaver

**chisholm** · Apr 18 '08, 01:24 PM

Hi and thank you for the advice concerning FrontPage and Dreamweaver

I have heard of FrontPage and Dreamweaver many times but don't have either of them at present.

Also, FrontPage did not come "bundled" with my version of MS Office 2000 Professional.

Since yesterday, I printed out the defective web page referred to before, and also the source code - direct from the web server it's on - to track down the cause(s) of the offending "question marks".

In many places where the offending "question marks" were, I was using two spaces to separate between words. In every such case the background code contained the following, at the exact point where the question mark was:-



Example (copied directly off the web server):-

1.? IF, AFTER? LOOKING AT THE MATHEMATICS, YOU AGREE THERE?? IS A PROBLEM? WITH? NO? SIMPLE? SOLUTION,? THEN YOU CAN? CONSIDER OFFERING? ROOT-CAUSE BASED SOLUTIONS, WHICH? INVOLVES? MORE? THAN? JUST? MATHEMATICS.

This part of it is rendered as follows in the background coding:-

IF, AFTER* LOOKING AT THE MATHEMATICS, YOU AGREE
THERE** IS A PROBLEM* WITH*
NO* SIMPLE<spa n
style="mso-spacerun: yes">* SOLUTION,*
THEN YOU CAN* CONSIDER
OFFERING* ROOT-CAUSE BASED SOLUTIONS,
WHICH* INVOLVES<s pan
style="mso-spacerun: yes">* MORE*
THAN* JUST* MATHEMATIC S.

THEN I NOTICED SOMETHING ELSE, which suggests possible vandalizing of my site by "hackers". The same paragraph on the page should read as follows (copied directly from the file on my own hard drive):-

1. IF, AFTER LOOKING AT THE MATHEMATICS, YOU AGREE THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH NO SIMPLE SOLUTION, THEN YOU CAN CONSIDER OFFERING ROOT-CAUSE BASED SOLUTIONS, WHICH INVOLVES MORE THAN JUST MATHEMATICS.

The corresponding background coding (again, copied from the file on my own system) is as follows:-

1. IF, AFTER LOOKING AT THE MATHEMATICS, YOU AGREE THERE IS A
PROBLEM WITH NO SIMPLE SOLUTION, THEN YOU CAN CONSIDER OFFERING ROOT-CAUSE
BASED SOLUTIONS, WHICH INVOLVES MORE THAN JUST MATHEMATICS.

Notice how there are NO instances of this:-

* 

And now NOTE HOW THE CODE COPIED FROM THE WEB SERVER IS RIDDLED WITH THESE.

So what has happened? It would appear that, somehow, the background coding of the file on the web server was corrupted, after I up-loaded the file from my own system to the web server.

So now my question is: can anybody suggest how this might have happened, and how to prevent it?

- Robert

**Death Slaught** · Apr 18 '08, 01:57 PM

Well I have no idea what could be causing it (except maybe the fact that you used something made by Microsoft).

Don't worry though some one will.

Thanks, Death

**eWish** · Apr 18 '08, 05:54 PM

Do you use an FTP program to upload you files to the server? If so, do you use ASCII or Binary mode? For text documents you need to be using ASCII mode. Binary mode would be for image and other binary data.

--Kevin

**drhowarddrfine** · Apr 18 '08, 06:40 PM

I'm running today again.

Word is a word processor that happens to attempt to create pages with html and does a horrible job of it. All that mso stuff is Word stuff that has no place in there. Current pages would use a utf-8 charset and not windows-1251.

That is an awful lot of markup for a basic page. Another tendency for Word. If you could learn the basic framework for a page, you could do a lot better than that.

Gotta run.

**DavidShillito** · May 15 '10, 02:41 PM

Put this under the <HEAD> tag ...

<meta name="GENERATOR " content="Micros oft FrontPage 5.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontP age.Editor.Docu ment">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">

**drhowarddrfine** · May 15 '10, 04:23 PM

Two awful ideas:
1) Trying to get a FrontPage document to work
2) Dragging up 2-year old threads.

**ncdave4life** · Apr 22 '12, 06:42 AM

Edit your Apache configuration file (perhaps /etc/httpd.conf) and comment-out the following line:

AddDefaultChars et UTF-8

Then restart Apache; on my Scientific Linux server, the following command does it:

service httpd restart

Trouble with unwanted question marks in web pages.

Trouble with unwanted question marks in web pages.

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment