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

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.