Fix: Broken emoji and special character encoding in Signup page and Homepage

[Ananya-CM]

🐛 Bug Report

Page(s) Affected: frontend/app/signup/page.tsx, frontend/app/page.tsx
Severity: Medium — visible to every user on page load
Type: Encoding / Character Rendering Bug

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📌 Description

Several emoji and special characters across the Signup page and
Homepage are rendering as garbled mojibake text due to incorrect
character encoding. This affects readability and user trust
across two of the most visited pages in the application.

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❌ Current Broken Behaviour

In frontend/app/signup/page.tsx:

Location	Broken (Current)	Expected
Password generator button	ΓÜí Generate Strong Password	⚡ Generate Strong Password
Password match indicator	Γ£ô Passwords match	✓ Passwords match
Password mismatch indicator	Γ£ù Passwords do not match	✗ Passwords do not match

In frontend/app/page.tsx (Homepage):

Location	Broken (Current)	Expected
Mobile menu close button	Γ£ò	✕
Mobile hamburger icon	Γÿ░	☰
Tagline separator	Open source ┬╖ Free to start	Open source · Free to start
Arrow link	Browse projects ΓåÆ	Browse projects →

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🔍 Root Cause

The source files appear to have been saved or copy-pasted with
incorrect UTF-8 encoding, causing multi-byte characters to be
misinterpreted. The garbled sequences (Γ, ┬, Γå) are classic
signs of UTF-8 bytes being read as Windows-1252 (CP1252) encoding.

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✅ Expected Behaviour

All emoji and special characters should render correctly
across all browsers and operating systems.

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💡 Proposed Fix

Replace all broken encoded characters with:

• Correct Unicode emoji/symbols directly (⚡ ✓ ✗ → · ☰ ✕)
• Or use their safe HTML entity equivalents as fallback

Files to update:

• frontend/app/signup/page.tsx
• frontend/app/page.tsx

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🖥️ Steps to Reproduce

1. Clone the repository
2. Run cd frontend && npm install && npm run dev
3. Visit http://localhost:3000 → observe broken characters
   in hamburger icon and tagline
4. Visit http://localhost:3000/signup → observe broken
   characters in password generator button and match indicators

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I'd like to work on this issue. Please assign it to me.

nsoc26

[github-actions]

👋 Hey @Ananya-CM!

Thanks for opening this issue! 🚀

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🙏 Thank you for raising this issue!
We’ll review it as soon as possible. We truly appreciate your contribution ✨

📖 Meanwhile, please make sure you have checked:

• README.md
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