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Appears to ignore charset in http-equiv meta directive

  • 3 cavab
  • 2 have this problem
  • 14 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

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<head> section contains <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

but the "micro" symbol is displayed as the white question mark on a black diamond background. In the datastream received this symbol is correctly encoded for iso-8859-1 as hex b5.

The browser reports page text encoding as UFT8 when queried by clicking on favicon on address bar, selecting "more info", then "general". However, page (as transmitted from host) does not contain the text "UTF".

This behaviour was observed on page http://www.8052.com/store/index.phtml?PRODUCTID=9.

Why is this? It appears to me that 1) the browser is ignoring the charset directive, or 2) I have created an override somewhere

<head> section contains <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> but the "micro" symbol is displayed as the white question mark on a black diamond background. In the datastream received this symbol is correctly encoded for iso-8859-1 as hex b5. The browser reports page text encoding as UFT8 when queried by clicking on favicon on address bar, selecting "more info", then "general". However, page (as transmitted from host) does not contain the text "UTF". This behaviour was observed on page http://www.8052.com/store/index.phtml?PRODUCTID=9. Why is this? It appears to me that 1) the browser is ignoring the charset directive, or 2) I have created an override somewhere

Chosen solution

The server sends the file as "Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8" and that prevails over what is specified in the main HTML file.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Visitors would have to change the encoding manually from Unicode to Western. Best would be to save the HTML file as Unicode (UTF-8) and re-upload the file.

The characters are in the same position in Unicode.

Only 20-µA current
Intel® BASIC-52
Power down mode reduces current requirements to 20 µA.
Some ±8V power
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Seçilmiş Həll

The server sends the file as "Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8" and that prevails over what is specified in the main HTML file.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Visitors would have to change the encoding manually from Unicode to Western. Best would be to save the HTML file as Unicode (UTF-8) and re-upload the file.

The characters are in the same position in Unicode.

Only 20-µA current
Intel® BASIC-52
Power down mode reduces current requirements to 20 µA.
Some ±8V power
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Thank you. Very silly of me to have ignored the HTTP headers. They were there, in front of me in the tcpdump I'd done. So, we have a mis-configured server or a user of said server who doesn't understand what he's doing.

This is frightening. I'm increasingly seeing examples of technology being used without any understanding of what it's doing.

Modified by catsmum

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It is best to keep the server set to Unicode and advice users to make sure that all files are saved as Unicode as well. Unicode should cover all possible characters and shouldn't cause issues with visitors from various countries.