I've been noticing records with upside down question marks (¿) in our database lately. At first I thought this was a bad translation between the browser and Microsoft Word, but recently I've discovered that this is not the case.

Someone manually entered a comment with apostrophes. When the record is looked up in the database they have been replaced by ¿.

What can I do to prevent this issue?

Thanks

bumping this topic since I have not received a response and have not found a solution.

It seems like an issue with using non-compatible character sets somewhere. How to fix this depends on which database and jdbc driver you are using and possible also what kind of application you are using. Eg. webapps need to set the correct character set in the http response or inside the html document.

Hi,

I tried putting an Apostrophe and it seems to be working well. Would really appreciate if you could put some sample code and your hibernate.cfg and .hbm files. Also, kindly put the text that you are trying to insert in the database.

I believe nordborg is on the right track with the issue.

I tested out this theory. I created a sentence like this in Microsoft Word (2007):

"Here's a line of text. It's got a few things in it to make it act super-crazy when I post."

I copied and pasted this into the website. Throughout all of the webpages that display this text, the text was displayed appropriately. However, when I posted the data to the database the apostrophes where converted into the upside down question marks.

I then copied and pasted the line of text from Microsoft Word to UltraEdit (text editor). Then I copied the text from UltraEdit and pasted into the website. Again, all of the web pages displayed the text correctly. This time when I posted the text to the database, the text also SAVED CORRECTLY.

I think this is a good confirmation that there is something going on with the character encoding. The plan is to re-encode the text before it gets posted to the database. This should resolve the issue. I'll try to remember to post back on here with the results. If I don't get back you can probably assume that it worked.

Thank you for your help and suggestions