Strange à character in Confluence Editor - no URL rewriting

[Benn Ingersoll]

When editing certain pages or macros on a page in Confluence, we semi-regularly are presented with a strange  character on the page.

A really easy way to reproduce this is:

1. Add an Expand macro to the page.
2. Add an empty table inside of the Expand macro.
3. Edit the Expand macro - change its Title, for instance, then click Save in the macro editor.

After those three steps, each empty cell inside the table of the Expand macro body is now filled with that  character.

I've come across a few similar questions on the matter and some point to URL rewriting as the issue. We're not employing any URL rewriting on our external facing web server, so that doesn't seem to be the issue in our case.

We just upgraded to version 5.5, but have been seeing this issue since at least version 5.0.3.

Let me know if more information would be helpful.

Thanks!

[crf · Accepted solution]

These strange characters are the result of either a web page or server misinterpreting UTF-8 encoded characters in another encoding, frequently ISO 8859-1. For example, the copyright character © is code point 00A9, but in UTF-8 this encodes as C2 A9. If this encoding is accidentally performed a second time or misinterpreted later, then you get © as a result, because  is is code point 00C2.

There are a lot of different things that can cause this, including problems with a web browser, but it's more likely that something in the macro's text processing is not working with character encodings correctly.

[Benn Ingersoll]

Thank you, Chris, for the explanation. I'll pass along this info to our support staff and see if it helps get to the bottom of our issue.

[Benn Ingersoll]

From our support staff's perspective, the encoding is correct on all our Confluence tiers and we unfortunately experience the issue.

Marking this answer as accepted anyway, as I would imagine it could help others...

[Benn Ingersoll]

Thanks the reply.

I am able to replicate it in IE9, Chrome (Version 34.0.1847.116), and FireFox (Version 29.0).

The database is PostgreSQL 8.4.20, UTF8 encoded.

Let me know if any other information may help.

Thanks again!

[salehparsa]

Hi Benjamin,

I've tried to replicate this issue in my own instance and I couldn't reproduce it.

Can you please give me more information about this issue and your instance? (e.g. Browser version, DB version, etc)

Cheers,

Saleh