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why do I have to keep on resetting Character Encoding?

  • 5 replies
  • 16 have this problem
  • 27 views
  • Last reply by cor-el
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Stokkers
Stokkers

Some symbol characters on websites are different on Firefox than they are on IE 8.0, but are OK after reselecting UTF-8.

e.g.: I have just started to use EW4 and have been editing one of my pages, but after uploading to the net, some characters are changing. For example:

Paul’s should be Paul's

£2 should be £2

“Pride and Prejudice” should be "Pride and Prejudice"

Some symbol characters on websites are different on Firefox than they are on IE 8.0, but are OK after reselecting UTF-8. e.g.: I have just started to use EW4 and have been editing one of my pages, but after uploading to the net, some characters are changing. For example: Paul’s should be Paul's £2 should be £2 “Pride and Prejudice” should be "Pride and Prejudice"

Chosen solution

Thanks for your help. It seems to be working fine on Chrome as well as IE, so my problem, should I chosse to look into it further, is to start learning a bit more, but at 70 odd, I don't know if the brain can function properly. LOL

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All Replies (5)

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor

With which content type is that page send by the server?

  • Tools > Page Info > General

Press F10 or tap the Alt key to bring up the "Menu Bar" temporarily if the Menu Bar is hidden.

Stokkers
Stokkers Question owner

Hi Cor-el

Thanks for your reply

The content type is - text/html

Encoding: UTF-8

First line of coding is:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

When the change has taken place, that line starts with:  - Byte Order Mark (BOM) - whatever that is and how it gets there is a mystery to me.

Do you need to know anything else?

BTW, URL is: www.wisbech-town.co.uk/events.htm

Ken

Modified by cor-el

cor-el
cor-el
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  • Top 10 Contributor

That page is send by the server as Western(ISO-8859-1), see Tools > Page Info > General.
If the server send an encoding then that always prevails.
Only if the server doesn't send an encoding then Firefox does some sniffing to determine the encoding.
So if you want to serve pages as UTF-8 then you need to instruct the server to send your pages as such.

Stokkers
Stokkers Question owner

Chosen Solution

Thanks for your help. It seems to be working fine on Chrome as well as IE, so my problem, should I chosse to look into it further, is to start learning a bit more, but at 70 odd, I don't know if the brain can function properly. LOL

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor

Those other browsers do content sniffing and use the Content-Type as specified in the meta tag or use the Byte Order Mark (). 

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Firefox doesn't do that if the server sends a content-type in the HTTP response headers like I wrote above. 

HTTP response header: Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1


That is also why you see that BOM in Firefox (check your editor and make sure that it doesn't add a BOM at the start of the file).