Replacement characters

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The replacement character ( ) is a character that is displayed instead of non-displayable characters.

The character is in position U + FFFD in the Unicode block special . It is represented in most fonts as a black diamond with a white question mark .

The replacement character - also replacement character or in Unicode REPLACEMENT CHARACTER - should be displayed if a character is encountered that is not defined in the set character set . Whether this actually happens depends on the implementation in question; instead, there can be a mess of characters .

In German-language texts, the replacement character is typically displayed instead of umlauts and ß when a text encoded in ISO 8859-1 is displayed with the setting UTF-8 .

Web links

Wiktionary: substitution signs  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations