Weird ? Character showing in text ?

Hi

I have this very strange problem on my ZenCart site that is bugging the hell out of me. Basically when you enter any text to a page via the WYSIWYG editor, the resulting page has a number of question mark characters which seem to be at the end of every sentence, but also instead of a point in unordered lists?

Here is a screen shot:

Links to the pages:
u:monster
p:monster

http://intelligentworkshoptools.co.uk/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=34_48_35&products_id=89

http://intelligentworkshoptools.co.uk/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=34_48

My guess is that the editor is actually throwing these in somehow?

Any ideas?

In the heading in the table, click on these symbols <> and use this below:

<ul> <li>blah blah</li> <li>blah blah</li> </ul>

Hi, thanks.

Yes I have found that by typing in raw code get around the issue. But that's not really going to impress my client. They are less likely to want to learn even basic HTML. Is there not a work around for this?

What version of Zen Cart are you using?
I just did a test on 139h on a test site and worked perfert without using the <>, i just clicked on the bullet list in the editor

139h too. It's a Monster Template, so maybe it's that. I'll get on to them :(

Oh MY... The old Monster Template doing her best...
Take time and switch back to the classic template and do a test product and see if you get the same results...> If perfect then you track the problem through the template you purchased...

another reason such codes might show up after saving html is page encoding doesn't match the database table type.

Like haredo said it has everything to do with the template you are using and not Zen Cart.

Thanks guys.

Could you explain what the issue is with Monster?

Also, what encoding are we talking about and how can I check it?

As far as the encoding, it has to do with the doc type that is setup in your header. Some doc type settings doesn't decode certain character in html such as (', ;).

I am assuming that information will change from one product to another and it is added as product description what I don't really understand why not use unordered list instead of table, table takes a lot of page space and needs to be styled.

Your client has the knowledge to create a table but don't have knowledge to create an order list. They can edit the content in WYSIWYG which allow them to create a list same way as table.

Hi Thanks. I've been playing around with this for a couple of days now. I was alarmed at your mention of tables, as I've done all the product input so far and I was sure I'd not used any tables! The mistake I was making was copy and pasting direct from a manufacturers website straight into the editor. This was obviously pulling in the table. So I've fixed that by pasting into notepad first.

You where also right about the extraneous characters. So I can kind of work around that. One thing that is really frustrating though is that if you double space between a sentence, you get the question mark symbol. Double spacing is just something I learned at school and do automatically. Now I'm having to get out of the habit.

Is there any way I can fix this, rather than working around it. Can I alter the doc type? Is it as simple as that?

The issues that you are facing have to do with the template and are not something to do with Zen Cart.

The template you bought from TM was designed to work with the database that the creator had setup on a server.

In database tables you have an option to what format decoding you want to use for that table, I suggest you look into your template html_header and zen cart default template html_header. Change the doc type to match Zen Cart default template.

Never done this with Zen Cart but if you Google the problem you will understand why there are so many different decoding system, which goes back to the fact that some languages use special characters in their typing hence different decoding options (Which makes me think, the developer of that template is from country where they have special characters so he had to change the doc type to display the special characters collected from the user)

You can warn your client never to cut and paste in html_area from anywhere except notepad or wordpad. I personally never use the html area. I do my editing in html editors then paste the pure text in the area.

Searching for an answer to this problem for the past couple of days, almost every discussion leads to a different set of steps hopping that will fix the problem.

i ma using the classic template and after upgrading to 1.3.9h starting to get these ??? in database, i even copied from the manufacture web site to Notepad++ and then to database, that did not safe the problem.