Hi, On my site on some pages the letter ü displays normally while on some pages it just shows a question mark (?) like Glück on some pages and Gl?ck on some. Both the pages have no DTD and no charset defined and are viewed in the same browser. The letter is in the same spot on both pages, so the same hierarchy and style is applied. What gives? Can somebody advise? Thanks!
So, why don't you add a charset to the pages? In this case I'd go to some popular/well known German (or whatever the language is) site and copy their META stuff from the page source. Otherwise you'd need to use ASCII characters, which is a pain in the a$$. http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/ASCII-HTML-Characters/index.php
Thank you for your reply. It is not just German, I have people registered from all over the world and I tried adding <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> HTML: but that doesnt help.
Your hosting server ALSO has a charset-- and it will override anything you set in the meta tag. My guess for why the same letter sometimes shows and sometimes doesn't might have to do with how it got there. That is, did they type it on a foreign keyboard, or did they copy/paste from some other text, for instance. One way to get it working for everyone if you have zero control over the server is to have a copy-paste other people can use instead of the keyboard OR (this I doubt) maybe you could get everyone to type in the actual Unicode (obviously if your charset set by the server is really low there's nothing you can do but the most popular charsets easily include East and West Europe as well as usually Cyrillic and Greek). You can test it yourself-- go to character entities page on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references scroll down) and type some in manually, and then take some from a page (go to a German language wiki page and highlight-copy a funky letter and post on your site). Look at which methods get the letter to show consistantly. But of course getting it set properly on the server would be easier. : ) Lastly, the page (he HTML document) has to be saved in the same charset too. Common Note-pad-imitator editors usually ask you which charset you want to save in with a new document.