Displaying special characters on the web

After much trial and error, I've learned what it takes to display special characters (such as em or en dashes and curly quotes etc.) reliably on practically any browser. My recommended steps are: - Save the content in your database and XML files as UTF-8 - Don't announce your charset as UTF-8 in either the HTTP headers or a META tag. This will break your pages badly in Netscape Navigator 4 and Internet Explorer 5.0. - Convert the Unicode characters that HTML knows about to numeric character references. Here's how you do just that in PHP. This example is copied verbatim from http://homepage.mac.com/marko/ (wink wink, nudge nudge), and requires PHP to be compiled with --enable-mbstring: $f = 0xffff; $convmap = array( /* <!ENTITY % HTMLlat1 PUBLIC "-//W3C//ENTITIES Latin 1//EN//HTML"> %HTMLlat1; */ 160, 255, 0, $f, /* <!ENTITY % HTMLsymbol PUBLIC "-//W3C//ENTITIES Symbols//EN//HTML"> %HTMLsymbol; */ 402, 402, 0, $f, 913, 929, 0, $f, 931, 937, 0, $f, 945, 969, 0, $f, 977, 978, 0, $f, 982, 982, 0, $f, 8226, 8226, 0, $f, 8230, 8230, 0, $f, 8242, 8243, 0, $f, 8254, 8254, 0, $f, 8260, 8260, 0, $f, 8465, 8465, 0, $f, 8472, 8472, 0, $f, 8476, 8476, 0, $f, 8482, 8482, 0, $f, 8501, 8501, 0, $f, 8592, 8596, 0, $f, 8629, 8629, 0, $f, 8656, 8660, 0, $f, 8704, 8704, 0, $f, 8706, 8707, 0, $f, 8709, 8709, 0, $f, 8711, 8713, 0, $f, 8715, 8715, 0, $f, 8719, 8719, 0, $f, 8721, 8722, 0, $f, 8727, 8727, 0, $f, 8730, 8730, 0, $f, 8733, 8734, 0, $f, 8736, 8736, 0, $f, 8743, 8747, 0, $f, 8756, 8756, 0, $f, 8764, 8764, 0, $f, 8773, 8773, 0, $f, 8776, 8776, 0, $f, 8800, 8801, 0, $f, 8804, 8805, 0, $f, 8834, 8836, 0, $f, 8838, 8839, 0, $f, 8853, 8853, 0, $f, 8855, 8855, 0, $f, 8869, 8869, 0, $f, 8901, 8901, 0, $f, 8968, 8971, 0, $f, 9001, 9002, 0, $f, 9674, 9674, 0, $f, 9824, 9824, 0, $f, 9827, 9827, 0, $f, 9829, 9830, 0, $f, /* <!ENTITY % HTMLspecial PUBLIC "-//W3C//ENTITIES Special//EN//HTML">; %HTMLspecial; */ /* These ones are excluded to enable HTML: 34, 38, 60, 62 */ 338, 339, 0, $f, 352, 353, 0, $f, 376, 376, 0, $f, 710, 710, 0, $f, 732, 732, 0, $f, 8194, 8195, 0, $f, 8201, 8201, 0, $f, 8204, 8207, 0, $f, 8211, 8212, 0, $f, 8216, 8218, 0, $f, 8218, 8218, 0, $f, 8220, 8222, 0, $f, 8224, 8225, 0, $f, 8240, 8240, 0, $f, 8249, 8250, 0, $f, 8364, 8364, 0, $f); echo mb_encode_numericentity($html, $convmap, "UTF-8"); ...I just thought I'd share! --Marko -- "Difficult to see, it is... always in motion is the future."