Why are weird characters showing up on my site?

If you start to see abnormal characters in your code (especially that replace HTML entities like ampersands, commas, em dashes, etc.) that you did not put there, what’s probably missing is the meta charset tag in the head of your HTML. It will look like this:

	<meta charset="utf-8">

UTF-8 tells the browser that all of the text on the website will use standard Unicode characters, so you won’t get any more of those characters on your website! The Unicode Standard means a unique number is assigned to every character, so it will appear correctly no matter what platform or language is used. 

Per Mozilla, "[UTF-8] ensures that you can use characters from just about any human language in your HTML document, and they will display reliably." And W3Schools proclaims, "UTF-8 (Unicode) covers almost all of the characters and symbols in the world." Yay!