That weird A sign in front of the ? sign

[i*Rate]

Does any intelligent person out there know what this new A (with a circumflex over it) sign is meant to mean in front of the ? sign, which now appears on the internet? I know that it is the third letter of both the Romanian and Vietnamise alphabets ('cause I looked it up), but that does help much.

It's a bit like trying to find out if you have symptoms of swine flu, rather than a cold or ordinary flu!

[Siduhe]

When exactly do you see "£"? Using an RSS feed or entering text into a box or something else? It's a text encoding issue and is probably an issue with the site you're browsing rather than a general problem. Pretty specialist though.

[i*Rate]

Thanks Siduhe, you are the intelligent person out there who I was looking for. I have it showing on this site, in the advert for faster broadband access between the sudject titles.

[Siduhe]

Wouldn't worry about it - it's to do with the text encoding on the advert being served up and how this web site displays it. I'm at the absolute limit of my [limited] knowledge on the subject, but pretty sure there's nothing wrong with your system.

[mockney piers]

You can change the default encoding on your browser. Flick through a few of them until everything renders correctly. UTF8 is usually fine.

[Siduhe]

Ah, but if you go UTF8, then quids (????) becomes ���� or at least does in my browser....

Swings and roundabouts, I guess. I would just be tempted to stick with default and ignore the circumflex

[Ann]

I have the same thing on my computer. Glad I'm not the only one but I don't really understand the explanations but thanks for trying.

[mockney piers]

Not very many people really bother to get their head around it. I had a colleague who was an expert and I never had the foggiest idea what he was bleating on about. It all boils down to there being a lot more letters out there than we might care about on this forum, but that an Arabic, Chinese, Urdu, or wingding speaking website will care about, and because programmers are lazy sods all these different alphabets are encoded using the same numbers, so applications, including browsers need to know which little squiggles to draw on your screen.

Your computer or phone and your browser and the original author may all have had different ideas about which squiggle was intended, copied & pasted or used. Then it all gets complicated and weird squares and unexpected squiggled turn up. All very boring I grant you, but just thought you might like to know.