[sclug] Character encoding - summary

[Peter Brewer]

Many thanks for everyone's replies.  To summarise:

Most modern browsers ignore character encoding meta tags for various 
technical reasons, so they are essentially useless.  There are two ways 
to deal with this problem:

1) Set the encoding in your web server e.g. in Apache using the 
directive "AddDefaultCharset iso-8859-1".  This is of course server wide 
though so may not be terribly desirable.

2) Set the encoding in the headers, in my case using PHP: 
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1");

So in answer to Sean's question - no I haven't found another way to do 
it using META tags.

Cheers

Peter



Sean Furey wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 07, 2006 at 02:06:03PM +0000, Peter Brewer wrote:
>   
>> After struggling with this all morning... I stumbled across the answer 
>> five minutes after emailing you.  Typical!
>>     
>
> Do share :-)
>
> To me the correct thing to do would be put the charset in the HTTP
> headers, not a META tag, but that's not always possible, so I'd be
> interested if you found any solutions using the META tags...
>
> Sean
>