The iPhone app I'm working on uses html help files and special characters such as
ü and ê
are being mangled my iPhone's mobile Safari. Anything I can do to correct this?
If you're using XHTML, ensure that the content of your files really is the encoding specified in the doctype. If you're using just plain HTML, consider using XHTML instead, or
Use HTML entities (e.g. é)
Use the META tag to specify an encoding
Have you tried using numerical character references? Alternatively, perhaps you can use a <meta http-equiv="content-type" ... element. Also, maybe there's a better way to tell mobile Safari the character encoding of HTML files (equivalent to the server's HTTP Content-Type header)
Related
When visiting a website that contains Unicode emoji through the Wayback Machine, the emoji appear to be broken, for example:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210524131521/https://tmh.conlangs.de/emoji-language/
The emoji "😀" is rendered as "😀" and so forth:
This effect happens if a page is mistakenly rendered as if it was ISO-8859-1 encoded, even though it is actually UTF-8.
So it seems that the Wayback Machine is somehow confused about the character encoding of the page.
The original page source has a HTML5 <!doctype html> declaration and is valid HTML according to W3C's validator. The encoding is specified as utf-8 using a meta charset tag.
The original page renders correctly on all major platforms and browsers, for example Chrome on Linux, Safari on Mac OS, and Edge on Windows.
Does the Internet Archive crawler require a special way of specifying the encoding, or are emoji through UTF-8 simply not supported yet?
tl;dr The original page must be served with a charset in the HTTP content-type header.
As #JosefZ pointed out in the comments, the Wayback Machine mistakenly serves the page as windows-1252 (which has a similar effect as ISO-8859-1).
This is apparently the default encoding that the Internet Archive assumes if no charset can be detected.
The meta charset tag in the original page's source never takes effect when the archived page is rendered by the browser, because with all the extra JavaScript and CSS included by the Wayback Machine, the tag comes after the first 1024 bytes, which is too late according to the HTML5 specification: https://www.w3.org/TR/2012/CR-html5-20121217/document-metadata.html#charset
So it seems that the Internet Archive does not take into account meta charset tags when crawling a page.
However, there are other archived pages such as https://web.archive.org/web/20210501053710/https://unicode.org/emoji/charts-13.0/full-emoji-list.html where Unicode emoji are displayed correctly.
It turns out that this correctly rendered page was originally served with a HTTP content-type header that includes a charset: text/html; charset=UTF-8
So, if the webserver of the original page is configured to send such a content-type HTTP header that includes the UTF-8 encoding, the Wayback Machine should display the page correctly after reindexing.
How the webserver can be configured to send the encoding with the content-type header depends on the exact webserver that is being used.
For Apache, for example, adding
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
to the site's configuration or .htaccess file should work.
Note that for the Internet Archive to actually reindex the page, you may have to make a change to the original page's HTML content, not just change the HTTP headers.
what type of encoding or what do I have to do to make my web site display properly the text with German characters like this: Käse and not like this: K�se ?
Here is what I use for doctype:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
and here is what I use for encoding:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
the collation in mysql that I use is utf8_general_ci, I have never done web sites with other languages except for english (from scratch). I dont know what I am missing!
Thank you for your time!
Your encoding choise looks fine.
There is just two steps left: You have to make sure that the content type in the HTTP header also says the same, and you have to make sure that what you actually send is encoded using UTF-8.
UTF-8 should used for sites that cater for many languages, so is suitable for your needs.
The meta tag is correct too, though you may want to ensure that the server is sending the right Content-Type header.
Ensure that the HTML file is also encoded with UTF-8 and not ASCII or another codepage.
In general, you need to ensure that all steps from the DB to the browser use UTF-8 (so, DB columns are UTF-8, transferred to the server as UTF-8, rendered as UTF-8, transferred to the browser as UTF-8 with the right headers and meta tags).
From my expiriense, for utf-8 to work right:
MySql data needs to be in some of the "utf-8" collations
The meta tag needs to define charset as "utf-8"
The MySql connector needs to be set to "utf-8" (for php, its mysql_set_charset)
The server-side file (*.php or the like) needs to be saved in utf-8 (not actually necesary, but it saves some pain)
I having a hard trying to properly display Vietnamese text in ColdFusion. I've proper charset set to UTF-8 but still no luck. The same texts work fine in a HTML page. What else am I missing? Any suggestion would be much appreciated.
Html:
ColdFusion:
Thanks!
There are two things you need to watch out for, as far as I recall of the top of my head.
The first is to ensure that the .cfm file itself is saved as UTF-8 - this is a file system option, and will probably be settable in your editor. This ensures that the UTF-8 characters are correctly preserved when saving the file.
The other is that every .cfm file that includes any UTF-8 text should start with:
<cfprocessingdirective pageencoding="utf-8" />
This ensures that ColdFusion delivers the page to the browser in the correct format.
Just to be sure, when you display your working HTML, can you check the page encoding used by your browser (ie. in FireFox you can right-click+page Info). Maybe your text is not UTF-8 encoded that could explain the problem...
I'm working on an app which involves the use of webkitgtk. It works fine except non-english characters. Example, webkitgtk widget does not render the following Russian text correctly.
Пишу в English, значит все в порядке.
Спасибо!
It rather display this,
Пишу в English, значит
вÑе в порÑдке.
СпаÑибо!
How do I make webkitgtk display international text correctly?
The displayed string looks like UTF-8-encoded string interpreted as ISO-8859-1-encoded string. You should correctly set encoding.
E.g., if you are loading the HTML string into WebKitWebView, you should correctly specify its encoding (via encoding argument to webkit_web_view_load_string).
If you are loading a web page from the internet, make sure that its encoding is correctly specified (http server sends the correct Content-Type header or web page has correct http-equiv="Content-Type" specification).
WebKit engine itself should handle multilingual texts fine.
You need to do character set conversion. Glib offers a great interface to do so.
Is there any restrictions for it to show normally?
Sounds like an encoding problem. For special characters like that, I prefer to use HTML entities. In this case, try »
After my experience, a question mark usually replaces undecodable special characters when you encode your special characters with utf8, because web browsers by default decode the web page using iso-latin1. You can/should explicitely declare the encoding of your web page using the following directive:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
for xhtml, or
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html"; charset="utf-8">
(inside the element), for HTML.
Regard this post as a supplement, because I guess that using the xml/html entities like » or » mentioned above are the better way to go.
You can also use »
If your Apache server is configured with...
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
...in the httpd.conf file (which, strangely, was the default on my server), then Content-Type specs in the .html files (e.g., <meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">) will be ignored, causing character codes above 127 to be interpreted incorrectly.
Comment out the AddDefaultCharset line and restart Apache.