Weird Spacing problem

Problems with IE6 and Opera

[KMxRetro]

Hi folks,
My name is Ken and I'm a HTML-a-holic. :)

I have a strange problem with my website. Everytime I use a standard space or no-breaking space, (  ) on my website, IE 6 is rendering it as a question mark. Opera renders some as an "r".

Site address is in my profile and the problem is most obvious on the release dates page. Does anyone know WHY or HOW this is happening? Most importantly, does anyone know how I can fix it?

Thanks in advance,

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 10:20 pm (utc) on Sep. 16, 2002]

[DaveAtIFG]

Reboot! :) :) Seriously, IE 5.01 looks fine from here. Opera 6.05 shows a box, an ASCII (decimal) 219 character I suspect, immediately before the title of each release on the Release Dates page, but otherwise looks OK.

[martinibuster]

I'm on a MAC, IE 5 and you've got this living in the top left hand corner of your page: 

I looked at your source and those are positioned just left of your DTD.

I understand that there's some kind of weird dysfunction when cutting and pasting from a mac into a template, as well as editing code in a cms template from a mac. Although editing your code in BB edit then copy/pasting into the template seems to work fine.

Random suggestions, may or may not stick.

[KMxRetro]

Thanks martinibuster.

When I look at the site with Opera on Windows 2000, I have that also at the top of the page, but it doesn't appear to be shown in the source code.

Does anyone else have any ideas?

[bobriggs]

Your server is definitely returning the '' before the beginning of the <DOCTYPE tag>

You can see it using the sim_spider:
[searchengineworld.com...]

The tool that I use shows it before the DOCTYPE. If it's not in your source code then the server is emitting it.

[martinibuster]

OR, it could be in the source code of the template that generates the code that makes it onto the web. It shows up on multiple pages. Definitely check this out a little closer.

Every once in a while I notice slightly funky code in cgi-perl-php cms stuff, here and there that needs to be tidied up.

[KMxRetro]

OK folks, a big thank you to Martinibuster.

After my last reply, Martini said that I should check one last time through the source code. Figuring I had no better option (even though I admit I thought it would be a waste of time :)), I did.

I still couldn't see anything in the source code, and Dreamweaver's (still) basic search and replace found nothing.

I came across a piece of software from SilverAge Software called Handy Find and Replace and I set it to work. As I couldn't see the characters that MartiniBuster mentioned, I copied them from the post and hit search.

Lo and behold. 1 match in 1 file that is included in EVERY page of my site! Looking again, I STILL couldn't see it in the source code of that file, so I just set Handy Find and Replace to replace the characters with nothing.

It worked! No more dodgy spacing, no more weird characters (even in Opera!).

Thank you once again Martinibuster. I owe you one!

I fully recommend Handy Find and Replace to anyone in a similar situation, it just does the job and nothing else.