​ characters being added in blog posts seemingly at random

[RStretton]

I have recently started getting the issue where by â€‹ characters keep on appearing in text elements in blog posts. It only seems to happen after I've copy/pasted something from Word but it never used to be a problem so something must have changed. Obviously the text editor isn't handling special characters like apostrophes properly but I can modify those to fix them. What I can't do is get rid of the â€‹ charcaters randomly inserted at the start of paragraphs.

Removing the formatting by pasting from notepad to the text element doesn't work and neither does using the Tx button.

It is super annoying. Here is a recent example: https://www.yesterdaysairlines.com/1400-model-reviews/thy-airbus-a310-203-tc-jcl-aeroclassics

How can i get rid of these characters that make the writing look ugly and unprofessional?

[Adam7]

Thanks for your post, @RStretton.

When you use Notepad, is it set to use plain text? I think what you're seeing is a text encoding issue, and you'd likely see this pasting that text into any web-based rich text editor. 

[RStretton]

This is literally just notepad - it only has plain text!

This never used to be an issue posting from Word direct so something has changed at your end. How can your editor not support apostrophes in Calibri? Like I said I can modify the apostrophes but it doesn't get rid of the nonsense at the start of the paragraph. Plus your text editor seems to have no capability to allow for or support special characters, which must annoy your French and German customers.

The text actually looks fine in the editor it is only when it is published the weirdness starts.

Regardless of all of that surely your remove formatting button should resolve any issues anyway? It is clearly a bug at your end as either:

- the remove formatting button should do what it says it does

- the editor should show it doesn't support the characters and give a way to resolve it

- the editor should just work properly!

[RStretton]

Ok this is getting worse. I just published a new blog post that was hand written in your editor and it still has these characters in it in random places. I recreated the elements and they disappeared. 

Interestingly I copy pasted a couple of links from earlier Weebly blogposts of mine from back when your text editor worked properly and suddenly they get these stupid characters - because you don't support special characters anymore. Here's an example when writing in Zurich with the correct character over the u your editor turns it into:  Zürich

I would appreciate an answer to this. So many issues on this community are ignored and basically unfixed. It seems you go to great lengths to not fix issues.

[PaulMathews]

@RStretton @Adam I've never encountered a special character issue in Weebly so I thought I'd try out "Zurich" per your comment. First, I did a Google search to get the Zurich text where the "u" has the umlaut. Next, I copied that text and pasted it into a test page (not a blog post but I can't really see why it'd work any differently). I pasted the text into a title text element and a paragraph text element. The title text is in a serif font and the paragraph text is in a sans serif font. Of note, I pasted using the Chrome right-click "Paste as plain text" menu choice. I NEVER paste content into the Weebly editor with external formatting (the site css alone should be responsible for imposing font styling on text). Single quotes can be problematic (even when copied into Notepad) and I frequently have to do a global replace of those quotes with one that I manually type into the find/replace box in Notepad BEFORE I copy any content out (and Notepad will hang on to invisible characters in paragraph text that you can see if you examine the page html so don't assume that Notepad strips out all formatting - it doesn't). Generally speaking, I try to author content directly in the Weebly site editor and ALWAYS use the plain text paste option when I have to paste in external content.

In the screenshots below, you'll see that I had no issue with the umlaut character in either the serif font title or the sans serif font paragraph text when I pasted the word Zurich into the editor under the plain text paste option (I didn't try it using regular paste because, again, I never use regular paste in the browser and frankly don't care if that approach generates invalid characters - it's always wrong to paste in external formatting even though the Weebly site editor does a pretty decent job of stripping that out).

[RStretton]

Well I just copied this chunk of text from within the editor itself (note inside the editor it doesn't show any odd characters) and pasted it into a new text element with the paste as plain text function and all that did was add an extra stupid character at the front so pasting as plain text clearly isn't working at least on my site - so although I appreciate your suggestion it doesn't work:

[RStretton]

I also took out a picture caption and repasted it using paste as plain text option and that did NOT stop Zurich from being shown in the published article incorrectly. This was the text:

Aero Icarus from Zürich, Switzerland, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

[Bernadette3]

I was not able to replicate the error you are describing, @RStretton

I'm not sure if it will help, but is your browser up to date? 

[RStretton]

I updated the browser (Chrome) just in case but it has made no difference. Could this be related to the theme my site is using? Can you look at my site specifically?

[Bernadette3]

You're using a responsive theme (CleanLines) but it's not the newest version. You can try changing the theme to CleanLines 2 to see if that helps. 

Were you able to log into the editor after updating your browser? It looks like the last login was not using the latest update. You can check your browser version here. 

[RStretton]

Yes I have logged in with the latest version. I even logged in using MS Edge (updated to the latest version) and it made no difference. I still believe this is a bug caused by the failure of the text editor to manage characters properly.

What are the differences between the newer version of Clean Lines and the present? I am reluctant to upgrade when I don't know what else will be changed / damaged.

[Bernadette3]

In general, the biggest changes you will see when switching themes are logo/navigation placement, and font options. You shouldn't notice a difference with the logo and navigation since it is an updated version of your current theme.

You will have to redo the header sections of the pages, though, so I recommend making sure you have the content of your headers (like background images) ready to re-upload from your device. 

[WildC]

This is happening to me too - but on old posts. It's literally appeared there on posts that are 6 years old!

I have tried deleting the text and re-typing it directly in the browser (so no copy and paste) but when I save the page the characters reappear.

Here's an example: https://www.cherryjeffs.com/art-blog/learning-paper-engineering

I've now fixed this post - see reply below.

Help please!

[WildC]

So, I've managed to get rid of the characters in that post by:

1. Removing the © sign 
2. Removing an apostrophe (pop-up's -> pop-ups)
3. Removing an extra line space made using the enter key.

So it seems like it is to do with a mis-interpretation of UTF-8 but I don't know why that should have suddenly happened when it's been fine for years.

Any ideas what I can do about it so that it doesn't affect the rest of the posts? (I've checked that I have UTF-8 specificed in the header.)

[Adam7]

Hmm... If you switch the font of your site to something else, does that resolve it, @WildC?

[WildC]

Hi Adam, thanks for that suggestion. I can't change the font because it is my brand font across a lot of different media. I also have embedded custom h3 and h4 tags with that font as well. Plus, the problem also occurred in my h2 tag which has a different font but admittedly that's an even rarer font!

I have only found a few old posts with this problem so I'll take it that there was some random formatting in there that generated the problem and I'll resolve it as best as I can.

I'll report back if I discover anything new about why it's happened.

[Adam7]

Hopefully, it's just a few old posts, @WildC!

[CD41]

I keep having this same issue, and it seems to be getting worse. It's taking me longer to try and edit these stupid characters out than to write an entire blog post --I'm getting quite fed up with it and am contemplating moving over to WordPress... 

[tripdontfall]

I am having this issue with a brand new blog post completely typed within weebly editor 

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Help!