Question mark characters displaying within text, why is this?
The following articles will be useful
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-syntax.html
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-connection.html
After you connect to the database issue the following command:
SET NAMES 'utf8';
Ensure that your web page also uses the UTF-8 encoding:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
PHP also offers several function that will be useful for conversions:
http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php
http://us.php.net/mb_convert_encoding
Edit your Apache configuration file on the "mirror" server (the server with the problem), and comment-out the following line:
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
Then restart Apache:
service httpd restart
The problem is that the "AddDefaultCharset UTF-8" line overrides the Content-Type specified in the .html files; e.g.:
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
The most common symptom is that character codes above 127 display as black diamonds with question marks on them (in Chrome, Safari or Firefox), or as little boxes (in IE and Opera). HTML files generated by Microsoft Word usually have many such characters, the most common one being character code 160 = 0xA0, which is equivalent to " " in the Windows-1252 encoding, and is often found between span tags, like this:
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">ááá </span>
I got here looking for a solution for JavaScript displayed in the browser and although not directly related with a database...
In my case I copied and pasted some text I found on the internet into a JavaScript file and saved it with Windows Notepad.
When the page that uses that JavaScript file output the strings there were question marks (like the ones shown in the question) instead of the special characters like accented letters, etc.
I opened the file using Notepad++. Right after opening the file I saw that the character encoding was set as ANSI as you can see (mouse cursor on footer) in the following screenshot:
To solve the issue, click the Encoding menu in Notepad++ and select Encode in UTF-8. You should be good to go. :)