display issue with <li> elements in a textiled box

I have been messing with my CSS sytlesheets to fix some display issues. Specifically, messed with <li> and <ul> elements. Now i have noticed on a page with <li> elements in a textile editor box, that the list bullet is showing up as "• " instead of "•".

I am assuming this a CSS issue and not a textile or rails issue. Wondering what I need to do to fix this issue. The only bullets that are jacked up are those within a div that uses textile codes.

I'd start by examining the CSS rules that are being applied to those 'li's according to your browser. Fire up Firebug or Web Inspector or similar tool of your choice and inspect those elements to check the CSS rules being applied are the ones you expect.

Having said that, that string of surprising characters looks a lot more like a character encoding issue mismatch than a simple CSS error. Are you using the ':before' pseudo-class with a 'content' rule to set a custom character for your lists, by any chance? If so, there could be something going on with the character encoding that you're saving your CSS file in.

Chris

I think I may know the answer and it isn't CSS. I use a gem called blavosync to sync my development database with production. I just set up a new computer this week and used MySQL Workbench to create the empty development database prior to synching with production. In MySQL when you create a schema, you can choose the default character collation.

In this case I chose UTF8 -default. I checked out the production database and it appears to use latin1_swedish_ci. If I understand correctly, importing data from one SQL database to another and having different character collation types, can result in weird text.

In this case, the description field for this particular model uses textile codes for markup. Sure enough the normal "•" bullets are showing up as "•" instead. Silly me, I just checked the tables in the MySQL database and sure enough the bullets are screwed up.

So long answer short. It wasn't CSS, it appears to me to be a mismatch in the default character collation between my production and development databases and the result of importing from one to the other.

But it was messing with CSS <li> and <ul> elements that made me notice. Thanks for the assistance though.

(Reply moved inline.)

You bring up some interesting points, so I took a look at the database. Here is a copy of one post descripition from the database itself. Perhaps the • are cut and pasted while the other elements are being inserted via textile editor. That would account for this i think. Thank you again. I like to understand things I see.

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