7Random ASCII chars in footer? goes away when I clear the cache but comes back as soon as I visit another page.


new standard installation (drupal 7.32)
lighttpd + php 5.4 (fpm)
mariadb
this looks like a collation issue in your database tables. Perhaps you copy and pasted some text from a Word file or other file that had a weird character set encoding and when it was saved to the database the proper text was lost in the transition.

I recommend looking at where the text in your footer is coming from originally, a foreign webpage, an MS Word file, an XML file -- and what encoding it has.

Then I would recommend you look at the Collation Fixer module which is designed to help with this issue. It will properly set your set tables to 1 Collation -- you must then provide the correct text/prose/verbiage into your footer so that its in the same character set the database expects.


  A 'runtime' requirements checker (admin/reports/status) for checking
  all database tables have the right database collation (probably very
  MySQL centric).
  
  Offers the ability to fix tables with wrong database collation.
  
  The collation is either specified in your database settings or in
  hook_schema() or hook_schema_alter().
  
  This can be useful when developing non-english sites.
  
  Example of specifying in database settings in settings.php (will
  affect all tables - it's probably better to do it in hook_schema() or
  hook_schema_alter()):


&lt;?php
$databases = array(
  'default' =&gt; array(
    'default' =&gt; array(
      'database' =&gt; 'my-db',
      'username' =&gt; 'my-user',
      'password' =&gt; 'my-password',
      'host' =&gt; 'localhost',
      'port' =&gt; '',
      'driver' =&gt; 'mysql',
      'prefix' =&gt; '',
      'collation' =&gt; 'utf8_danish_ci',
    ),
  ),
);
?&gt;