So, im trying to validate one of my sites and it seems the majority of the pages are spitting out this error, except for the numbers change... From what I can tell its taking random lines, some lines that its choosing are blank, some have divs in them, etc. I cant find any characters or "bytes" that are non standard, etc. Does anyone know what causes this kind of thing? Im sure this may have some bearing on my SERPs so I would really like to fix this issue...
Could you please link to the page you are trying to check? Its just because of some special character which you copy/pasted from somewhere.
such validator error messages occur if you have used more than one editor to edit or create or modify a page and if the editors had different char set configurations or if you copied and pasted text from another page/another website with a different charset config to your page either way since you have the lines where these invalid characters occur open that file in a CLEAN editor LOOK at those lines - TOP one listed in error message always first !!! and delete the words and RETYPE with your clean editor again the same text - NO copy / paste !!! even BLANKS might be different if they have been pasted instead of created always start with TOP listed error first then revalidate to see if validation changes make sure you have correct charset definition in all meta tags a site NAME URL would have helped a LOT !!!
I just tried rewriting one of the lines that shows as an error and it didnt fix anything... I tried removing that line and the one above and below and it changed the error lines...
what you think to be space are NO space but invisible wrong characters example - when i look at your page with a qualified professional editor - then i see the anchor text of the link Discover� Student Platinum Card after the word Discover you have a wrong charset sign that is displayed as ? because it is wrong it seems at forst glance that all or most are the same hence that might be text you copied instead of typed into your pages ... in above sample case DELETE until it looks like Discovetudent Platinum Card then retype until it looks Discover Student Platinum Card and repeat on all cases listed hence MasterCard� from Chase 0% 6�Months Discover� Student Tropical Beach Card 0% 6�Months 16.99% 0% 6�Months 18.24% Discover� Student Monogram Card ... etc did u or did u NOT - just copy foreign content ?? instead of creating unique content .... PS these kind of errors are so extremely FATAL to bots that you have to find each error yourself rather than looking ar the error message lines !!!
Ah, the validator is down at the moment, but try taking out this line: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" /> and revalidate it. It should give you an error that the charset is missing and then try to use this one: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> Good luck!
Actually, the content was in XLS(Excel) format, then saved as CSV(Comma Delimited) then using a PHP script inserted into a MySQL database. Im sure there could have been some issue from the conversion of the XLS file. Im not sure how you identify a clean or professional editor, since im at work and we use Macs, can you reccomend an editor for Mac, currently im using one called TextWrangler and I dont see those messed up chars... Edit - I just saved the View Source of my page, put it into TextWrangler and opened it up with UTF-8 Encoding, and im seeing the errors your talking about now
sorry no mac editors known since the web mostly is Linux I run Linux and use Quanta Plus as editor but for future when converting files KNOW the charset definition of initial file then CONVERT file renaming charset is NO conversion !! there are special tools that convert all text of a file into another charset of same file before validator survives such kind of files and gives full validaton output you need to replace ALL to the very last one of such series of illegal code manually then revalidate the entire page apparently is UTF-8 with the exception of those space-looking special characters that appear even in my ffx browser as a black questionmark ultimately you may have to find a reliable procedure of creating clean text rather than converting a converted text even MySQL may one day screw up all data if you mess up things too much your MySQL also needs to be in same charset as your page/text/ etc
Truth be told ive never had an issue with database driven sites before, this is the first issue ive had with data types being wrong.... Im not seeing the question marks in my browser, probably because I changed the encoding type of the page to UTF-8 Now, I really need to figure out if I can get PHP to identify the invalid characters and remove them
and when job done successfully - you may remove your Lazy before your nick "D" - or better now to prevent self-hypnosis and to remove the laziness first before doing your job ... good luck P.S. one procedure would be to first find out which original charset the text was written by finding the desktop/PC on which the original doc has been created and by looking at that SW-config for charset it appears that you have 2 or 3 special characters that now appear empty blanks one of these special chars is a trademark symbol ( i the blanks after the credit card names using my usual conversion procedure the original html text appears to be NO utf8 nor iso8859-1 nor windows-1252 but since you run mac - if the doc also has been created on a mac- may be the mac default charset !!?? anyway when you finally figure out what charset then you have to correct the original full mysql db accordingly
Well, the document was originally created by my affiliate, so im not sure what they are using. The last time I updated the database via the XLS>CSV document was on my windows PC I just made a new one on my Mac and saved it as a CSV upped it and got different chars, but in the same places, I just went ahead and did a MYSQL REPLACE on the 3 different chars I found and that has eliminated 99% of the errors, however, im still having one that error that doesnt seem to be showing a strange char or anything, how do I go about finding that one?
I've just checked this with the validator: getcredit365.net/credit-cards/student.php There are 182 errors, most of them are easy to be fixed: + Use <br /> instead of <br>. + Missing ". + Don't use <b> and target=. + ID should only be used one time. Need more than one, use CLASS. Hope that helps.
as said above - easy to fix every error message is explained in the validator you may also look at your template and make corrections where needed important: start always with top errors first as a single error on top of page may cause additional errors all the way down the page
Yea, I know about the errors in the validator, however, before the page couldnt even be checked for validation.