White Question Mark in Black Diamond

Question

We are all familiar with the white question mark inside of a black diamond (�) when there is an encoding issue. Does this 'character' have an offical name? Or is it only referred to as the 'white question mark inside of a black diamond'? What would that name be if it has one?

Solution 1

It's the Unicode REPLACEMENT CHARACTER.

Solution 2

It's called "Replacement Character". See the related Wikipedia page.

U+FFFD �​: "replacement character" used to replace an unknown or unprintable character.

Comments

[mars-o]

so, how do we replace the replacement character? i mean what is its ascii code? so i can select it via sql, e.g. char(226) for â

[Pysis]

ASCII goes up to 128, and ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) up to 256, a single byte. If you wanted to replace this character, you might have to do so by splitting the 2 bytes it into 2 characters of 1 byte each: \xFF and \xFD.

[Scott - Слава Україні]

That is not an answer  to the question that was asked.

[Philip Hinton]

Not directly Scott, no. I was answering mars-o's question "how do we replace the replacement character?" with an Excel slant, as the same problem occurs in that environment also. That is how I got here in the first place - before I worked out my own solution. Cheers.