hi all, I have spent close to 4 hours on this '�'
i really need to know what charset owns it, maybe that will mark the beginning of it's end
the stubborn thing keep coming up in my application
thanks

It is not visible here so we can't say

Do you define your charset in your HEAD tags (I use ISO-88 whatever and it pulls up pretty much every special character known to man)?

you mean u cant see this characters i am seeing?

����������
����������

character that looks like a square box standing on it's sharp edge, with a question mark in it?

i must be losing it!

the problem is during insertion into mysql DB, the DB table uses latin1_swedish_ci encoding and all i do is grab a newly arrived string coming via base64_encode/decode

say the data is "cool", i get this naughty character separate every character, to form something like c�o�o�l�

just before the database insertion, i echoed the string which gave me the correct "cool"
only to check my db to see the character litter everywhere.

somehow, this occurs only on fields with type varchar(), char text, these field has their individual charset set to latin1_swedish_ci
i try changing the column charsets but no luck

same thing is messing up my current application - and i cant figure it out yet

i think this is getting tougher than it should.

I noticed that the character only shows up within my app, when i use firefox.
other browsers do just fine.

I was hoping that when i view this nairaland thread in other browsers, i wont see the character, but nah!
other browsers displays the character so making me think, i have just started.

one thing tells me it's a firefox issue, another tells me it's some kind of physics am yet to understand.
time is not my friend on this project.

i would have opted for the mysql repace() function but what character will i be replacing, my editors can't take the character without transforming it to question mark(?), this character is obviously not question mark.

i finally got a solution, i just exported the sql only to discover that somehow, the character evaluates to '\0' (without the quotes) and this happens within mysql only.

so all i did was

insert into blabla (x,y,z) values(20, replace('abcd','\0',''), 'c')
since replace is a mysql function and not php's
so the conversion is happening right inside the war zone.

though i still need to go back to school to go learn characters and alphabet

In my own case, i did something that converts from excel csv directly into html and then stored the html into dbase.
From what you said, i will try out some combinations and hope to solve the problem

i noticed too after you said it that the character only comes up after i save that html into dbase. . .so i need to use that your
replace function to solve it then. . .

in what database are u saving it in?

mysql dbase. I made the application such that after conversion of excel (*.csv) to html, it saves it in dbase, and later allows
editing of the stuff with a web-based wysiwyg editor