Garbage Characters in Confluence - ? - ??? - ??
Asked by Spencer Schill:

So we're running into an issue with Confluence that inserts a set of garbage characters when editing the content of a page.

The occurrance is sporadic, but there's one instance where it always happens.

* Open a page to edit (that has macros on it that allow text to be inserted within them (like a column).
* Whether the macro is empty or has text within it, *Edit* that macro.
* Here, the preview panel in the overlay window will have..
  * ? - that character will be inserted as such \<p\>?\&nbsp;\</p\>. Which commonly appears before and after a macro, but without the extra character.
  * ??? - will appear in place of apostrophes
  * ?? - will appear before quotation marks
* The insertion of these characters also continues to layer, after edit upon edit.
  * If I don't cleanup the characters manually, after a few times this will appear in the location of the \<p\>\&nbsp;\</p\> items... ???'???????????????

Attempts we've made at alleviating this were based on information we've found in these locations.

[https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/118073/suddenly-garbage-characters-appearing-in-texts-%C3%A3-%C3%A2-%C3%A2](/questions/118073/suddenly-garbage-characters-appearing-in-texts-%C3%A3-%C3%A2-%C3%A2)

[https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/119129/character-set-problem](/questions/119129/character-set-problem)

This is a download copy, that we manage, and host ourselves. Any advice and/or direction would be greatly appreciated.


Answers:
author: Bruna Griebeler
body: Hi Spencer!  

My first thought was indeed encoding, so some things you need to check:  

\* Database encoding; Check if the database schema is set as InnoDB and UTF-8.  
\* Browser encoding. On your browser, check if it's set as UTF-8. Also test accessing Confluence on other browsers.  

And also, check the macro itself. Is it a third-party plugin? What happens if you set your plugins as "Safe Mode"? When you set Safe Mode all the third-party plugins will be disabled, which will help you to check if this macro is bundled or not.  

Kind Regards

comments: author: Spencer Schill
body: Hi Bruna,

Thanks for your response, sorry it has taken so long to get back to you.

Below is our database setting that have been this way since the intial installation on our systems.

```
postgres=# \listList of databasesName | Owner | Encoding | Collation | Ctype | Access privileges-------------------------------------------------+----------------------confluence | confuser | UTF8 | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 |postgres | postgres | UTF8 | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 |
```

As for browsers, we've tested all browsers and the issue is duplicated across the board; IE8/9, Chrome, and Firefox. I've checked the browsers and they're all reading in UTF-8.

As for the macros, we don't have any third-party plugins installed and the macros we're seeing the characters in are primarily out-of-the-box Confluence macros like *column, section, panel,*etc. It also populates in any tables inserted in a page that have empty cells.

We just updated to v5.1.3 on Tuesday. Sadly that hasn't alleviated the issue either.

Thanks for your help!

-Spencer-


author: Spencer Schill
body: The current version of Confluence we're running is 5.0.3