291929 - Firefox does not display UK Pound sign

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 181344

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Sam Butler]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3

Firefox behaves abnormally when faced with the UK/GB Pound sign, the standard
currency symbol for Pounds Sterling, GBP. When more than one instance of the
character appears in the source code, not defined by the Character Entity 163 or
pound. (&163; or £), Firefox will delete the character along with the next
two characters, and replace them with a single question mark, then continue to
output correct markup. When Firefox is used to display the source code, it
appears as if the output was written and intended by the markup author, however
after having conducted my own test I can verify that it is browser behaviour. I
have checked any pages (including some on eBay and NatWest Online Banking) which
I have noted were displayed incorrectly by navigating to them in both Mozilla
and MSIE, and they function correctly.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create an HTML file.
2. By editing the source code, include the pound character followed by a string
of characters more than once in the page body.
3. Open in Firefox

Actual Results:  
Firefox will delete the character along with the next two characters, and
replace them with a single question mark, then continue to output correct markup.

Expected Results:  
Displayed the Pound Sterling character followed by the intended string.

This bug was present from 0.93 to the present build (1.0.3).

The browser environment was not altered in any way and uses the default theme.

Also tested on other Windows 2000 machines running post 1.0 versions of Firefox.

It should be noted that this bug prevents me from correctly using my online
banking service which is why I have rated the severity of this bug as Major.

Comment 1

[Steve England [:stevee]]

Attachment: reporter's testcase from URL

WFM Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414
Firefox/1.0.3
WFM Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050422
Firefox/1.0+
Sam, can you attach a screenshot of what you are seeing?

Comment 2

[Sam Butler]

Attachment: Screenshot of bug "in action"

This shows the described problems with the NatWest online banking service. I
assure you this is not a one-off and can provide further screenshots if
necessary. Also note that as I have said, the same page displays perfectly in
MSIE and Mozilla.

Comment 3

[Sam Butler]

Attachment: Screenshot comparing actual source code to output

This shot compares the HTML test case as its source is viewed using Firefox,
and using Notepad2, which was used to create the original document. Notice that
the output occurs also in the "View Source" window.

Comment 4

[Sam Butler]

I also remember having experienced the same problem on a friend's PC running
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise, but I've never tested on XP or 9x.

Comment 5

[Sam Butler]

(In reply to comment #0)
>When more than one instance of the
> character appears in the source code, not defined by the Character Entity 163 or
> pound. (&163; or £), Firefox will delete the character along with the next
> two characters, and replace them with a single question mark, then continue to
> output correct markup.

My apologies, Firefox deletes the next THREE characters following the Pound sign.

Comment 6

[Anbo Motohiko]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Created an attachment (id=181862) [edit]
WFM
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; ja-JP; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050423 Firefox/1.0+
...with changing character encoding to iso-8859-1.
Reporter, what is your default character encoding? Maybe it's not ISO-8859-1.


This testcase misses charset declaration. Add
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
in the head element, it will work correctly.

Comment 7

[Sam Butler]

(In reply to comment #6)
> (In reply to comment #1)
> > Created an attachment (id=181862) [edit] [edit]
> WFM
> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; ja-JP; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050423 Firefox/1.0+
> ...with changing character encoding to iso-8859-1.
> Reporter, what is your default character encoding? Maybe it's not ISO-8859-1.
> 
> 
> This testcase misses charset declaration. Add
> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
> in the head element, it will work correctly.


Very true. I feel as if I have wasted some time here. Normally I would include a
charset declaration when creating an HTML page, but the pages which showed this
abnormality did not use one, so it was for the purposes of recreating the
problem. Default character encoding was set to Chinese Simplified (GB18030), yet
I do not read or write in Chinese and have no reason to have changed my default
character encoding AT ALL. I'm now not sure whether this is a bug or not, as it
is still abnormal behaviour. As I have said, I experienced this problem on other
computers - could there be a problem whereby the default encoding is being
changed automatically without the user's knowledge? I definitely didn't know it
had been changed! If this really isn't a bug, do excuse me and resolve this bug.

Many thanks,
Sam Butler

Comment 8

[Steve England [:stevee]]

Resolved INVALID as per comment 7

You say that your have seen your problem since 0.93 - I assume you've used the
same profile since then, so all other versions of firefox you have installed
have used the settings from the previous version.

Whilst it's not inconceivable that a bug could have silently changed your
character encoding setting, it's not very likely. If you do find that your
charset encoding changes randomly, please do file a bug for it; otherwise I will
guess that you (or someone else) changed it accidently many months (years?) ago
and never realised the impact it would have.

Comment 9

[Richard Brodie]

Actually, this is a known bug; pound signs can confuse character encoding
auto-detection.

Comment 10

[Richard Brodie]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 181344 ***