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Smart quotes, special charaters and apostrophe display on web

We are having a problem with displaying smart quotes and apostrophes on the web particularly those coming from a database using SQL and coldfusion. Smart quotes are displaying as ÃƒÂƒÃ‚Â½
Apostrophes are displaying as ?
I have tried <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
and <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
but neither of these seems to work.
Does anyone have any ideas about how to get these to display correctly.

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gdemaria

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R7AF

This is typically a character encoding problem. Can you tell us what the character encoding is you're using. I've had this situation when the character encoding of a page was UTF-8, data from SQL Server. When using character encoding ISO-8859-1 the problem was gone.

http://htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/charset.html.en

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

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cbeverly

ASKER

Below is the code snippet I'm using. The first part is the actual code including quotes etc. And following is what actually displays.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
 
 
<body>
â€œUncle Jackâ€ Day created this brightly colored scene to show the moment when Adam and Eve were cast out from paradise. An angel flies down to greet the couple with an â€œeviction notice,â€ while their bleak future is spelled out in a note on the ground: â€œGravy train gone. Adam settled down. Work hard in the barren land . . .â€ Dey copied the figures from a reproduction of Michelangeloâ€™s Sistine Chapel ceiling, but instead of showing a large, threatening snake as their tempter, he painted a small creature that hides in the grass. (Lynda Hartigan, Made with Passion, 1990) The artist filled the painting with stripes and dabs of pure color to evoke Edenâ€™s lush surroundings.
 
 
</body>
</html>
 
 
This displays as
ï¿½Uncle Jackï¿½ Day created this brightly colored scene to show the moment when Adam and Eve were cast out from paradise. An angel flies down to greet the couple with an ï¿½eviction notice,ï¿½ while their bleak future is spelled out in a note on the ground: ï¿½Gravy train gone. Adam settled down. Work hard in the barren land . . .ï¿½ Dey copied the figures from a reproduction of Michelangeloï¿½s Sistine Chapel ceiling, but instead of showing a large, threatening snake as their tempter, he painted a small creature that hides in the grass. (Lynda Hartigan, Made with Passion, 1990) The artist filled the painting with stripes and dabs of pure color to evoke Edenï¿½s lush surrounding

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cbeverly

ASKER

When I cut and pasted this code there were quotes in the code part but now when I view it, it is inserting strange characters in the code as well as the display

TenTonJim

Make sure your text editor is set to UTF-8 also.