Weird L shaped character appearing in IE7 and IE6

Question

I have a weird character that is appearing in IE7 when I use a line break.

It's such a weird character it won't even copy!

Here's what it looks like in IE7, with the weird L shaped character at the start of the second line:

Here's what it looks like in any modern browser:

When I view the source of the page in a modern browser, there is no character there, it looks just as expected:

<h1>World-class beauty therapy<br/>
and day spa in Hamilton</h1>

But when I view the source in IE7 in a notepad, the character is there. However it doesn't copy, so I can't even paste it in here. So I have inserted a screenshot instead of the IE7 source. The highlighted blue text is the HTML in question. You can see the L shaped character at the start of the second line:

Does anybody know how to fix this? The site is built in Wordpress. I am editing the text in the HTML tab of the content editor.

I have about four places on the site that this is happening. And on another site too. Each time the character appears in IE7 when a line break
is used.

Any ideas on how to solve this?

Answer 1

There are two parts to the solution I found for this.

Just to be clear, I was using the text (HTML) editor, not the WYSIWYG editor.

Firstly, in one of the other instances where there was this L shaped character, there was a single space after the
and before the next word. That single space was some weird sort of character, because it took two backspaces to delete it. And the same happened when I copied it into notepad - it looked like a single space, but took two backspaces to delete it. Very weird, because I've never seen notepad have special characters like that before.

However that same technique didn't solve this specific instance shown above. I remove all extra spaces, so it was just pure HTML code, but for some reason it still had this character showing. So in the end I changed the width of the H1 tag in CSS so that it wrapped where I wanted it to, and then removed the
altogether. That got rid of the weird L shaped character.

Answer 2

Try editing the text in the "text" view in the WordPress editor.

Also try copying your text into Notepad first and then copy it from Notepad back into WordPress, this should get rid of any funny characters.

If none of these work, then just trying typing the content manually.