Tips and Tricks
Missing or Invalid Characters e.g. Umlauts - in Webpages using utf-8 Charsets
Utf-8 means "Universal Character Set" transformation format (8bit).
It is a charset encoding, that can represent every unicode character ... so why
are characters missing?
This can have 2 reasons:
Reason 1:
You are using a HTML host page, which does not include a charset definition.
Solution:
Add a charset definition e.g.
<head>
...
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">
...
</head>
to the header your HTML host page. Click here for more details.
Reason 2:
If a default charset is setup in the web server settings or .htaccess , then the charset will be sent in the http-header and any charset defined in the HTML/php page will be ignored. This means that it won't work even if you have defined e.g. " <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"> " in the header of the HTML page, because the webserver sends a different charset in the http-header.
Test:
You can test it by uploading an utf-8 encoded web page. Download utf-8-test.html (right-click on the link and select "Save Link as") or create a utf-8 file by yourself, upload it to your web server and open the file in your browser.
Solution:
- Change "add_default_charset" to "off" if its enabled in the web server configuration.
- Change "AddDefaultCharset" to "none" if its enabled in the .htaccess configuration file.
- Please contact your web provider if you have any questions regarding this issue.
Service:
We started to collect links to help and FAQ pages for providers using a default
charset.
Please contact us if your provider is using a default charset, so we can add the
provider to the list.
Alfahosting.de
https://forum.alfahosting.de/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=745
Green.ch
http://www.green.ch/deCH/Support/FAQ/FAQÜbersicht.aspx?udt_1171_param_rubrikde=Webhosting
See: "Anstatt der Umlaut-Zeichen werden komische Symbole angezeigt"
