<p>I'm not sure if it's my system, although I haven't done anything unusual with it, but I've started noticing incorrectly rendered characters popping up in web pages, text-files, <a href="http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-doctype/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">like this</a>:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.kbssource.com/strange-characters.gif" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.kbssource.com/strange-characters.gif</a></p>

<p>I have a hunch it's a related to the fairly recent trend to use unicode for everything, which is a good thing I think, combined with fonts that don't support all possible characters.</p>

<p>So, does anyone know what's causing these blips (am I right?), and how do I stop this showing up in my own content?</p>

[{'answer_id': 5693, 'author': 'Ecton', 'author_id': 457, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/457', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': True, 'text': "<p>It appears that for this particular author, the text was edited in some editor that assumed it wasn't UTF8, and then re-wrote it out in UTF8. I'm basing this off the fact that if I tell my browser to interpret the page as different common encodings, none make it display correctly. This tells me that some conversion was done at some point improperly.</p>\n\n<p>The only problem with UTF8 is that there isn't a standardized way to recognize that a file is UTF8, and until all editors are standardizing on UTF8, there will still be conversion errors. For other unicode variants, a Byte Order Mark (BOM) is fairly standard to help identify a file, but BOMs in UTF8 files are pretty rare.</p>\n\n<p>To keep it from showing up in your content, make sure you're always using unicode-aware editors, and make sure that you always open your files with the proper encodings. It's a pain, unfortunately, and errors will occasionally crop up. The key is just catching them early so that you can undo it or make a few edits.</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 5696, 'author': 'helloandre', 'author_id': 50, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/50', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': "<p>I'm fairly positive it's nothing you can do. I've seen this on the front page of digg alot recently. It more than likely has to do with a character being encoded improperly. Not necessarily a factor of the font, just a mistake made somewhere in translation.</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 5720, 'author': 'Mark Harrison', 'author_id': 116, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/116', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': "<p>It looked for a while like the underscore and angle bracket problem had gone away, but it seems it might not be fixed.</p>\n\n<p>here's a small sample, which should look like this:</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p><br>#include </p>\n\n<pre><code>____\n#include &lt;stdio.h&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<pre>\n____\n#include \n</pre>\n\n<p>Update: it looks like it's fixed in display mode, and only broken in edit mode</p>\n"}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/5682', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/117/']