Re: utf8 php howto?

>> In some circumstances, with "mixed" charsets on a page, and with IE in >> quirks mode, IE will try to "guess" the charset and get it (very) >> wrong. > > A single page or response can only have one characterset, there is no > mixing possible. Allow me to re-explain. Step 1. Generate HTTP headers that claim your document is UTF-8. Step 2. Generate some really bad HTML Step 3. Don't include a DOCTYPE [At this point, IE is in quirks mode, and assumes your charset in the HTTP headers is meaningless, because you clearly don't know what you are doing.] Step 4. Make the first N-bytes of innerHTML English ASCII, then quote something in non-ASCII in one language, then something else in another. IE will attempt to GUESS what charset to use, based on a heuristic evaluation of the bytes of innerHTML content. IE being IE, it will guess WRONG, sometimes. I spent the better part of a week working through this one time. I had zero control over fixing the Content or validating the HTML or getting a DOCTYPE on it, for "corporate" reasons far too complex to go into here. I did have a way to cram in the META HTTP-EQUIV tag, which finally convinced IE that it really really was UTF-8, despite it being in quirks mode. I cannot now produce the HTML/URL in question, at least not readily, nor am I sure any more what version of IE it was, since it was at a job in a bug reporting system I no longer have access to. You're just going to have to trust me that after I set up the same HTML on my OWN server just so I could tweak it by hand to go through all the permutations, I am quite convinced that this was a reproducible and consistent, if wacky, behaviour. I probably still have that copy of the document around on my own server, somewhere, though where I have it is a bit of a poser, and I can't access my own server from my current day job, so there it is. Dunno why MSIE trusts a META tag more than an HTTP header, but it "fits" the MS mind-set if you Zen on that enough. [Be careful not to think on it too much and get sucked in...]