HowTo Resources Real-world fixes, written by Kevin Crothers and ChatGPT.

Special Character Finder

Paste text → Violet hunts → non-US keyboard characters glow in violet
Violet is on patrol… sniffing bytes and hunting Unicode.
US keyboard baseline: ASCII 0x20–0x7E (+ tabs/newlines)
👹 Meet Violet The enchanted character hunter

Paste your text

This tool flags any character that is not standard printable ASCII (US keyboard). Tabs/newlines are allowed. Everything else is considered “special”.

…or upload a file for Violet to scan
Max 5MB. Allowed: txt, csv, tsv, log, xlsx. (Excel is scanned by extracting cell text.)
Clear
Tip: If you see lots of ?? or replacement diamonds (�), it usually means an encoding mismatch earlier in the pipeline.

What counts as “US keyboard”?

We’re using a practical baseline: printable ASCII characters (hex 0x20–0x7E) plus tabs/newlines. Anything outside that is flagged.

Why this helps PHP pages

Most “text won’t display” issues are really encoding issues (CSV/XLS export, DB collation, or page charset). This quickly exposes characters like ¬, Æ, √, curly quotes, etc.

Safe output reminder
echo htmlspecialchars($text, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE, 'UTF-8');
This page already does safe escaping + forces UTF-8.
Shareable URL
https://smortler.com/HowTos/special_Character_Finder.php