Why do strange symbols appear in accents and the letter ñ?

Category: Design

When accents and ñ appear as strange symbols, it is a character encoding problem. The two most common encodings are iso-8859-15 and utf-8.

Common causes

File saved with the wrong encoding. If your text editor saves to iso-8859-15 but the site expects utf-8 (or the other way around), you’ll see the weird symbols. Most editors allow you to change the encoding when saving — try switching between them.
Database with different encoding. If your table is configured as iso-8859-1 but you are inserting data into utf-8 (or vice versa), special characters are corrupted. Make sure the connection, table, and column use the same encoding.
The encoding is missing to be declared in the HTML. The browser needs to know what encoding to expect. Add this tag in the <head> section:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

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