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# Strange characters appear on my site

In some cases when publishing your site, certain characters such as ellipses (…), characters with accents and diacriticals (é, ö, ø, ñ, etc.), and special characters (™, ©, etc.) may be replaced by unexpected text.

When publishing a site, Sandvox stores the chosen character encoding within the HTML of each page. However, when publishing to a remote host, you may find that the host's server specifies its own (and possibly different) encoding.

When a visitor goes to view your site, their web browser might be told that a page is in two different character encodings. When this happens, the encoding specified by the Host's server takes preference, causing some characters to be displayed incorrectly.

To verify that this is the issue:

1. Go to the W3C Markup Validation Service.
2. Enter your site's address.
3. If there is a conflict of character encodings, you will see a message like this:

    Character Encoding mismatch!
    The character encoding specified in the HTTP header (iso-8859-1)
    is different from the value in the <meta> element (utf-8).
    I will use the value from the HTTP header (iso-8859-1)
    for this validation.

Ways to resolve the issue:

- Ask your Host to stop providing text encoding information in their HTTP headers.
- Change the character encoding of your site to match the encoding of your Host's HTTP headers. Please see "Character Encoding" for information on how to set a site's character encoding.

## Related Articles

- Character Encoding
- Host
- Troubleshooting
- Unexpected, extra characters appear on my site

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