Broken accented characters

• A file saved as UTF-8 was opened as an older single-byte encoding, so each accented letter became two characters.
• A file passed through a system that could not store the letter and substituted a question mark.
• The file was opened and saved again while it was being misread, which made the damage permanent.

• Names and places are wrong on everything sent to the people they belong to.
• The damaged spelling does not match the correct one, so joins and duplicate checks miss it.
• Sorting and searching by name put the affected rows in the wrong place.

• Search for the telltale pairs, most often a capital A with a tilde or a circumflex followed by another symbol.
• Search for question marks and replacement symbols in the middle of words.
• Check columns likely to hold accents: names, cities, and anything typed in a language other than English.

• Read the original file again with the correct encoding. This is the cleanest fix when the original still exists.
• Where only the damaged copy remains and the pairs are intact, reverse the misreading to recover the letters.
• A question mark cannot be reversed. Recover the value from the source, or leave it flagged; guessing the letter is still guessing.
• Save the result as UTF-8 and state the encoding wherever the file is handed on.

• Stray whitespace and invisible charactersTwo values look identical on screen but differ by a trailing space, a non-breaking space, or a hidden character.
• Smart quotes and look-alike charactersA character in the cell looks like an ordinary quote, hyphen, or letter but is a different character underneath.
• Name variantsThe same person or organization appears under several spellings, orders, and abbreviations.
• Case example: E-commerceA catalog where the same product was listed four times

TermsMojibake, Encoding, UTF-8, Unicode