Back in 2017 Mudcat was displaying as ??? many characters that it previously displayed OK, and I added a module to convert non-ASCII characters to HTML '&-codes'. The problem was fixed six months later, and most common accented letters have since displayed OK. The module remained in the add-on but I suggested it be disabled unless users were posting in non-western languages.

I recently had to rewrite this code so I made some changes. If the encoder is turned on - it is off by default - it will now only encode characters which I believe are not capable of being held in the database and are therefore displayed as ?, or converted to another character, even though they preview OK.

So these characters will no longer be encoded:

 ¡¢£¤¥¦§¨©ª«¬­­ ®¯
°±²³´µ¶·¸¹º»¼½¾¿
ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏ
ÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞß
àáâãäåæçèéêëìíîï
ðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿ

But eastern European characters such as these will be:

ş ğ ı ő ć ń ś ź ł ż ą ę

If you have the option turned off, and you occasionally post non-western letters, or symbols, I suggest you turn it on. If you already have it turned on you'll notice it no longer converts any of the letters above - for example é into é

It doesn't encode high-end unicode characters such a Chinese or fancy emoticons: nothing above u+26FF (#9983).
So you can display these: ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♭ ♮ ♯

Click 'Recover text' to restore the original characters, which makes them easier to edit.

Mudcat Browser Tools
(Version 2.4.7)