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Trying to find what character was replaced with Unicode replacement character

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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I am working with Firefox 52.1.2 on Ubuntu 14.04 (x86). In general I can see characters correctly, but sometimes I see a Unicode replacement character (octal 357 277 275), for example on this page:

http://www.mathhelp.com/how_to/slope-intercept_form/using_slope-intercept_form_to_graph_a_line/

I see "equation of a line is y = 3/4 x (?) 2" and I suspect from context the replaced character is a dash or minus sign.

I have verified that I enabled the option for pages to download their own fonts.

I'm trying to find out exactly what was the replaced character so that I can try to find a font to install which contains it, but when I copy and paste the text, I get the Unicode replacement character, not the original character. How can I find out what's the original character?

I tried looking at the page source -- no luck, the replacement character appears there too.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

I am working with Firefox 52.1.2 on Ubuntu 14.04 (x86). In general I can see characters correctly, but sometimes I see a Unicode replacement character (octal 357 277 275), for example on this page: http://www.mathhelp.com/how_to/slope-intercept_form/using_slope-intercept_form_to_graph_a_line/ I see "equation of a line is y = 3/4 x (?) 2" and I suspect from context the replaced character is a dash or minus sign. I have verified that I enabled the option for pages to download their own fonts. I'm trying to find out exactly what was the replaced character so that I can try to find a font to install which contains it, but when I copy and paste the text, I get the Unicode replacement character, not the original character. How can I find out what's the original character? I tried looking at the page source -- no luck, the replacement character appears there too. Thanks in advance for any advice.

Chosen solution

The page appears to be viewed with Western encoding selected and doesn't work properly with Unicode. When I select Western then I see the – = – character instead of the diamond with the question mark: y = 3/4 x – 2

Does this works for you or is there still a problem?

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Chosen Solution

The page appears to be viewed with Western encoding selected and doesn't work properly with Unicode. When I select Western then I see the – = – character instead of the diamond with the question mark: y = 3/4 x – 2

Does this works for you or is there still a problem?

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Yes, that fixes the problem! But I wonder why it's necessary to select the encoding. I thought that the web page would tell the browser what encoding to use. Anyway, I'm glad that I know how to fix it now, thanks a lot for your help.

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You're welcome.

A diamond usually indicates an encoding issue. If there is a problem with font support then Firefox would show a little box with the hex code of the character.