Character encoding problems with Firefox on 7.04

Aart Koelewijn aart at mtack.xs4all.nl
Mon Dec 10 21:09:17 UTC 2007


Op ma, 10-12-2007 te 19:56 +0000, schreef bill purvis:
> I've been chasing a problem that has been bugging me since
> I switched to Ubuntu. I have data which includes the UK pound
> sign, and yes you may have seen references to this before,
> but it has moved on to another area. The problem now is
> viewing the HTML files produced by PHP with FireFox.
> In the HTML produced I include:
> 
> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
>   charset=iso-8859-1" >
> 
> (actually all on one line - not that it should matter).
> However, when I view the page with Firefox, I find that 
> it always switches to UTF-8 which renders my pound characters
> as this weird splodge. If I click on View->character-encodings
> it displays a menu and I can select "Western (ISO8859-1)"
> and then it displays correctly. However, when I move to
> a different page it always reverts to UTF-8. Why is it
> ignoring my <meta ...> command? How can I get it to
> default to ISO-8859-1?

In webpages the encoding used is the one set in the preferences of the
webserver (f.i. Apache). To be sure characters like € and £ are
displayed right you will have to use html-encoding, for € it is €
for the £ I don't know £ ?. Or, if you are sure your page will
always be on a server that uses UTF-8, you might use the UTF-8 symbol.
Or, if you have access to the configuration of the server you might set
that to ISO 8859-1.

Hope this helps, had me confused for quit some time too.

Aart






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