NYCPHP Meetup

[Michael B Allen]

You got it baby. Now you can talk about character encoding at cocktail parties.

On 10/20/07, Cliff Hirsch <cliff at pinestream.com> wrote:
> John, Michael:
>
> Thanks for all the info.
>
> > And by '?' do you mean '?' or '�' ... there is a big difference.
> What is the difference? I have seen both?
>
> If anyone else is struggling with this, John and Michael have great points.
> There are some great articles on Wikepedia and Sitepoint regarding this
> issue. Essentially, you need to look at the entire "publishing" chain --
> from text editors, to database to php to Apache to the browser....
>
> In my case, this narrowed down to a few problem areas.
>
> 1. I conveniently "grabbed" some special characters from a windows editor.
> When, where? Who knows. But it's obvious. Lord knows I couldn't figure out
> how to get that special squiggle thing any other way.
>
> 2. ISO-8859 and Windows-1252 char set are very, very similar. Naturally,
> it's all those lovely special characters that are the difference. From
> Wikepedia: "It is very common to mislabel text data with the charset label
> ISO-8859-1, even though the data is really Windows-1252 encoded."
>
> 3. My pages were encoded as utf-8 -- the Apache default. Sure, I set the
> meta tag to 8859. Not enough -- use:
>  header('Content-type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1');
>
> 4. I still have some of those special characters, and I know they are not in
> the 8859 char set, yet things are look'n fine. Puzzling, eh. Why? From
> Wikepedia:
>
> "Many web browsers and e-mail clients will interpret ISO-8859-1 control
> codes as Windows-1252 characters in order to accommodate such mislabeling
> but it is not a standard behaviour and care should be taken to avoid
> generating these characters in ISO-8859-1 labeled content."
>
> 5. And this is big!!!
> I use the Firefox html validator plug-in to validate my pages. It uses Tidy.
> My pages came up as perfect -- till this problem hit when I switched
> platforms. Yet, when I ran them through the W3c validator, it barfed all
> over them.
>
> Use http://validator.w3.org to validate your pages.
>
> Cliff
>
>
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-- 
Michael B Allen
PHP Active Directory SPNEGO SSO
http://www.ioplex.com/