missing german characters!?

Discussion in 'HTML & Website Design' started by scubah, Jun 2, 2008.

  1. #1
    anyone any idea why the correct german characters are not appearing in the body of my site? http://redseasound.com/deepdivers/de/index.php

    they get replaced by question marks . . . .

    in the footer the correct characters are appearing just not the body!!??

    thanks in advance for any help!
     
    scubah, Jun 2, 2008 IP
  2. kk5st

    kk5st Prominent Member

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    #2
    Your document declares you're using utf-8, which is the correct character set to use. Unfortunately, your editor is one of those MSFT oriented goofs that is saving as windows-1252, a proprietary charset that is not compatible with utf-8, or iso-8859-1. W-125x uses entities that are in a range reserved for non-printable control characters.

    Resave your documents, specifying utf-8. Do not use Unicode, as those silly editors then add an unnecessary BOM to the doc, which makes IE6 crazy.

    If you want the easy way out, set charset=windows-1252 and make the world think you're an amateur.

    The reason they show ok in the footer? The ü is represented by ü instead of by insertion from the editor.

    cheers,

    gary
     
    kk5st, Jun 2, 2008 IP
  3. Trusted Writer

    Trusted Writer Banned

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    #3
    The correct charset for German is Western European (iso-8859-1)

    Change this
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
    HTML:
    For this other
    <meta http-equiv=content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
    HTML:
    If you are using a script, this meta tag could be found either in your template or a header file in your CMS system.
     
    Trusted Writer, Jun 2, 2008 IP
  4. kk5st

    kk5st Prominent Member

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    #4
    A correct charset, not the correct charset. Even windows-1252 is ok if that's how the text is encoded. The issue is that the text was saved as windows-1252 and not utf-8 as was declared. Changing the declaration to iso-8859-1 would not make a difference. It's the text itself that is mis-encoded.

    utf-8 is always the correct charset, while the others (except the windows stuff) are subsets of utf-8.

    cheers,

    gary
     
    kk5st, Jun 2, 2008 IP
  5. scubah

    scubah Peon

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    #5
    Thanks everyone as the site was using php header all i had to do was change in the german header.php to http-equiv=content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

    your all stars!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
     
    scubah, Jun 3, 2008 IP
  6. scubah

    scubah Peon

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    #6
    btw was using notepad++ so i dont think that was a problem as inside this editor the characters always showed OK, I'm so happy I'm at the point where I don't use a wysiwyg editor ;)

    ps have a problem with the index.php in IE only the right column drops down (not inline with the left column) any ideas about this?
     
    scubah, Jun 3, 2008 IP