Character Set Help

[lefkogt]

My site, http://www.greatpikespeakbirdingtrail.org/, was integrated with WordPress(.org) blogger.

Ever since I have experienced charset issues where single/double quotes (for the most part) come across as black question mark characters when displayed in browser (I use Firefox mainly).

I have this in index.php, "<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" />" to force proper display BUT it doesn't work. When I manually set encoding in IE or Firefox to windows-1252 it works. Seems like meta tag being ignored??

Wordpress defaults to UTF-8, I have manually set browser to UTF-8 and still get black question marks.

Can someone explain what the issue is, how charsets work and how I fix my problems?

Thanks
Gary

[bradgrafelman]

Yeah, your server is sending out UTF-8:

> HEAD / HTTP/1.0

Host: www.greatpikespeakbirdingtrail.org

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 23:46:01 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_tsunami/3.0 FrontPage/5.0.2.2634
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
X-Pingback: http://www.greatpikespeakbirdingtrail.org/xmlrpc.php
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.2
Last-Modified: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 23:46:04 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Apparently, the headers sent by servers take importance over META tags. So, you need to modify the header() call in your PHP script(s) to reflect the correct charset.

[halojoy]

I have this in index.php, "<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" />

you really should change it to UTF-8.

Some years ago
charset=Windows-1252
- was the ruling, most commonly used character set

Last couple of years, this was generally used:
charset=ISO-8859-1

Now most frequent used charset at websites and in php software is:
🆒 charset=UTF-8 🆒

I have set as much of my settings, in webServer config, in php.ini setting
and in software, php scripts I download, my texteditors, my browser
to use UTF-8
This was after I read an article written by a designer of a Text Editor application
Works quite well for me now, without any major problems,
even though we have these extra characters in My Swedish language:
å ä ö Å Ä Ö

😉

[lefkogt]

So, I set HTML meta tag for UTF-8, Wordpress is UTF-8, browser set for UTF-8 and I still get wrong characters:

"Colorado�s great diversity of habitats"

Note "?" for single quote character.

Any ideas?
Gary

[bradgrafelman]

Did you re-edit the entry once the UTF-8 setting was applied?