At 01:18 PM 4/11/2011, you wrote:

>Strange occurance
>
>A client of ours is using Firebird Server 2.1.1 database with our .NET program user interface
>They have in some text fields the symbol º
>One morning while running their program, the symbol º changed to �
>Now the � symbol is showing as �
>Nothing supposedly has changed on the server, workstations, etc.....
>
>I've tried to recreate myself - using the º symbol, exiting out, symbol stays and shows correctly.
>
>Has anyone ever seen anything similar, where you enter a symbol, and when you check it later it actually displays differently?
>
>And any ideas on what to look for and check for?

Nothing has happened to the data. :-) All it means is that, on that client machine, they have set up their character encoding to be different to what yours is (and presumably, most of your other users, or you would have heard from them by now). � is the Unicode codepoint for the "replacement character", which sometimes appears as a white question-mark inside a black diamond. With other code page setups, you'll see it as a hollow square.

When I went to the Web to approve your message, I saw the UTF8 image in my browser (which is set up to display UTF8) but in my email client, which follows my system's default encoding for plain text (an ansi single-byte encoding), I see them as this string of 3 (ansi) single-byte character images �.

./heLen