Unwanted symbol ă in tabular environment

Question

I am trying to create a table using the tabular environment using this code snippet:

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
\begin{table}
    \centering
        \begin{tabular}{|l|l|}
                \hline
                \multicolumn{2}{|c|}{\textbf{Scenario}} \\ \hline
                This & 15 \\ 
                Is  & 10  \\
                Example & 100  \\ 
            Tabular  & 10 \\ \hline
        \end{tabular}
\end{table}
\end{document}

This works fine for this MWE, but in my own document the result has strange added symbols in the table. All the symbols are the same: ăăăăă.

Does anyone have a solution? I've been struggeling with this for quite some time and tried a few things myself without success. The MWE I has no issues, still I would like like to know if someone has expierenced the same issue before.

Answer 1

I get the problem when the document is encoded as Latin-1 and a "NO-BREAK SPACE" character is used (as between the letters X, Y and Z)

% -*- coding: latin-1 -*-
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\begin{document}
X Y Z
\end{document}

If the file is UTF-8 encoded, the same input gives

The fact is that if inputenc is not loaded, the "NO-BREAK SPACE" character typesets the glyph in the current font that's T1 encoded (if fontenc had not been loaded nothing would have been printed) and in position 0xA0 there is precisely an "ă".

With the following modification

% -*- coding: latin-1 -*-
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[ascii]{inputenc}
\begin{document}
X Y Z
\end{document}

running LaTeX would give something like

! Package inputenc Error: Keyboard character used is undefined
(inputenc)                in inputencoding `ascii'.

See the inputenc package documentation for explanation.
Type  H <return>  for immediate help.
 ...                                              

l.6 X?
      Y?Z

which might help you in zapping the offending character.