[sclug] Character encoding

[Peter Brewer]

Dear All,

I'm having some issues with character encoding in MySQL/PHP webpages.  I 
have a MySQL database which as far as I can make out has data stored in 
Latin1 format which I believe is basically iso-8859-1.  I have some PHP 
pages generated from the database with a meta tag set as follows:

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

But... when I browse the pages, the web browser (I've tried a number of 
the usual browsers) sets it's encoding to UTF-8 and various characters 
are bodged up.  If I manually set the browser encoding to iso-8859-1 
then all the characters are displayed ok.

Any ideas why web browsers are ignoring the meta tag?  For a live 
example see the first entry on the  following link:

http://www.catalogueoflife.org/search_results.php?search_string=salmon&match_whole_words=on

Many thanks

Peter