How to decode these characters? á é í

Question

I'm querying the MediaWiki API to get Wikipedia data into my Filemaker database. When I load the data into a browser, the characters show up properly but when it comes into Filemaker, characters with diacriticals get converted to these odd characters: á is converted to √° (square root symbol + degree symbol), é is converted to √© (square root symbol + copyright symbol), í is converted to √≠ (square root symbol + not equals symbol) and more. What character encoding is that? Thank you!!

Caddie

Looks like UTF-8 misinterpreted as Mac-Roman. – Gondi

Take a look at the raw bytes for that character that you see in MediaWiki and compare those to what are in Filemaker. Also, check out this article which talks about different ways of writing the character é: dev.twitter.com/docs/… – Movable

Answer 1

You're all correct about the misinterpreted characters, the Troi URL FMP plugin I was using to set FMP's user agent (as MediaWiki API requires) was responsible for pulling in the garbled characters. Solution was to bypass the plugin: FMP script performs Applescript "do shell script curl -A" to set user agent and query API and pull response back into FMP and all characters come through properly!

Caddie

Answer 2

As @Joni suggests in his comment, this is UTF-8 misinterpreted as MacRoman. Letter á is C3 A1 (hex.) in UTF-8, and C3 is “√” in MacRoman, A1 is “°”. So you should just try to set the program to interpret the data as UTF-8.

Dictum

Answer 3

I'm sure this isn't the full list, but it did what I needed. Here is a lookup for the codes:

√© é e

√° á a

√≠ í i

√≥ ó o

√∂ ö o

√º ü u

√¥ ô o

√® è e

√ß ç c

√± ñ n

√∏ ø o

√´ ë e

√§ ä a

√• å a

√Å Á A

√∫ ú u

√ª û u

√Ø ï i

√â É E

√† à a

√¶ æ ae

√Æ î i

√¢ â a

√£ ã a

√î Ô O

√ü ß ss

√ì Ó O

√≤ ò o

√Ω ý y

√ñ Ö O

√™ ê e

√Ä À A

√ò Ø O

√Ö Å A

√∞ ð eth

√á Ç C

√Ç Â A

√π ù u

√í Ò O

√¨ ì i

√ú Ü U

√à È E

√û Þ Th

Organ

Do you happen to know what š means? All the remainers in my data do follow your list just this one I cannot decipher. Thanks so much! РOcclusive