extra bits

[artee]

Could someone please tell me where all those little gloopy bits come from at top of poem.  (; nbsp; ).
I've had them once before and seen them on other postings as well.

[acw]

I thought it was when the formatting went a bit wrong and all we saw was the codes and not the format itself.  I don't really know though! :-p

[jno]

sometimes looks like they have appeared in place of the double quote marks but not sure if that's always the case

[gen2]

The example given is part of the HTML formatting code for a non-breaking space.  The whole code has a & before the nbsp and no semicolon.  It has only happened to me once in about 300 posts and that was when I was using spaces to spread out some characters.  After typing it, I went back and added some more spaces and the result was as you describe.
What I think is happening is that the program on the AB website tries to automatically include the formatting codes but these are hidden from the user so when you edit your text, you are in danger of deleting part of a code or placing extra spaces within the code.
Another common error of this type is when you paste in a URL as a link to another page.  If you press the return key after pasting it in, some people seem to get the 'New Paragraph' code added on to the URL and so the link doesn't work.  The solution is to press the spacebar immediately after pasting in a link.  Just to test it out, I will see if I can cause it to happen at the end of this post.

              ?
              ?
              ?  Has it happened?

[gen2]

Yes, the 'nbsp' has appeared where I deleted two spaces from the middle of a series of spaces.

I think the same thing may happen if you paste in text from a Word document
�like this�

[artee]

Ah... thank you very much for your answers the 3 of you.  I was mucking about a bit .

[bruce5755]

Oh artee, you are a tease!