Character coding problems

[andysears]

Tweet

These two pages use identical character coding. Yet the first shows the pound sign as
a question mark.

fteam

This URL also fails in W3C, with the message,...Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because on line 309 it contained one or more bytes that I cannot interpret as utf-8 . Yet the page below does not get the same error.

The second one show the pound sign correctly.

"Search, find and conmpare the cheapest attraction and theatre tickets"


Any ideas anyone?

cheers
Andy

[Barry]

I think you need to send the specific character encoding in the header of the document.

Not sure how to do it in asp in php you send it in a header() command

Here is a document that may explain to you:-
Setting the HTTP charset parameter

- I hate it when browsers mis-interpret stuff like that it really does ya head in dont it!!?

Ta

Baz

[andysears]

thanks for that, and yes its driving me mad.

I have even cut and paste the whole header section out of the one that displays correctly and paste it in the other. Still the same.

[Kevin-ProperPrice]

Have you tried entities instead of the £ sign?

e.g.

£
or
£ 

I think both are valid utf-8 characters for the £ sign

[andysears]

HI,

The pound sign is encoded with the vbscript formating as below.

<%= FormatCurrency((Rec2.Fields.Item("search_price").V alue), 2, -2, -2, -2) %>

As I say the strange thing is both sites have identical encoding, but... are on different servers, so i am wondering if that is where the problem may be.

[Kevin-ProperPrice]

Several solutions spring to mind, but it's been a long time since I used asp and I am unable to test any of these!

instead of formatcurrency, use formatnumber e.g.

<%= "&pound;" + FormatNumber((Rec2.Fields.Item("search_price").V alue), 2, -2, -2, -2) %> 

or, try to correctly encode the pound sign

<%=Server.HTMLEncode(FormatCurrency((Rec2.Fields.Item("search_price").V alue), 2, -2, -2, -2) )%> 

or,if all else fails, change the page encoding to

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

[net_veteran]

The pound sign in your example where it doesn't work is encoded in ISO-8859-1 while your page header declares UTF-8, that's why it doesn't work.

You need to make sure that the script that generates that pound sign generates it encoded as UTF-8, or else change the page declaration in the header to ISO-8859-1.

[andysears]

Ok thanks for that.

Changed the declaration now and pound is back.

I still cannot see why it happened though, looking at the two page headers between the sites they are the same.

cheers everyone

Andy