Symptoms

1. Random inverted question marks appear replacing quotation marks/hyphens copied from a Microsoft Windows document. For example:

   Jeremy¿s going to buy me a surprise gift and I¿m going to act surprised.
   

2. Using Oracle with non UTF8 encoding, eg. WE8ISO8859P1 ISO 8859-1 West European
3. No error recorded in the log file

Diagnosis

Failed the Database Round-trip test in the Database Encoding test. Also you can execute this query to check which is the current database character set:

select value from nls_database_parameters where parameter='NLS_CHARACTERSET';

Cause

Some of the characters used by Windows are not covered by the database encoding (eg. WE8ISO8859P1).

Resolution

Switch to an Oracle encoding that supports Windows characters. eg. AL32UTF8 (Confluence 5.5 or later versions) or WE8MSWIN1252 (Confluence 5.4 or earlier versions). You can refer to oracledba.co.uk for tips on how to change the characters.