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Asked: 2026-05-24T05:58:39+00:00

I have a problem with mdash character (—, or Alt+0151). Thing is I have

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I have a problem with mdash character (—, or Alt+0151).

Thing is I have a page with dtd like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

I also have a form (shortened version):

<form name="dep_new" action="whatever.php" method="post">
    <input class="mandatory" id="dname" type="text" name="dname" value="<?php echo $department->name; ?>"/>
</form>

It is working with PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.1 to store value of that input.

Now, when I work with any other browse but IE and input an mdash character into this field (by typing it Alt+0151) I get a proper long dash. It saves and retrieves from database with no problem.

However when I try to save it using IE9 I get the following:

Typing: Test—Test

After save and refresh: Test—Test

In other browsers I see: Test�Test

Becasue this is a departmnet name it is being displayed on another page and the results I get are :
In IE: TestTest
Other browsers: Test[a thing I cant post here – a square with 00 and 97 in it]Test

This square thing looks like this:

----
|00|
|97|
----

However if I do the same in say FF or Chrome, it displays fine in IE page as well while in IE input it shows:

Test—Test

Any attempt to encode/decode fails.
However if I change dtd to:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN>

It all works fine in all browsers…

Any thoughts?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There is no Em-dash in standard Ascii table or ISO 8859-1 character set, it is available in Windows-1252 charset as 0x97 but this is a windows only standard. It is also available as unicode character U+2014 so you’d better use UTF-8 encoding for your pages if you want to safely use em-dash. add this to your <head>:

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