UTF-8 encoding - Strange characters

General Interworx Control Panel Info General Inquries
1

I have a client reporting strange characters appearing on some of their pages. They are using software called, “Web Gallery Wizard”, to generate their code. Characters such as “?” appear in all browsers. This only occurs when viewed on the server. The characters do not appear when pages are viewed locally. Here is a link:

http://www.usaconservation.org/media/gallery/index.htm

The software author claims that the issue is the problem of my web server:

[INDENT][I]This issue is due to the server side character encoding. Your computer (which runs Windows XP) supports UTF-8 character encoding, which is a universal encoding standard allowing characters to be displayed properly on the screen.

While the vast majority of Web hosts support this encoding and work well, some older Web host servers may not support UTF-8 encoding. We advise you to contact your Web host and inquire about UTF-8 support.

Web Gallery Wizard relies on the UTF-8 encoding standard to support International customers and gallery viewers that need the larger character sets to correctly display their respective languages.[/I] [/INDENT]

Older indeed! My server is quite up-to-date, thank you.

Has anyone else seen this? Ideas?

Thanks,

Nick

2

The server default is iso-8859-1, which is probably what’s causing problems. You should be able to edit the /etc/httpd/conf.d/domainname.com.conf file for this account and add this line before the </VirtualHost> tag and then restart apache to fix it:

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

3

Thanks Greg! That worked perfectly. Thanks also for the 3 minute turnaround. :slight_smile:

Nick

4

Hi,

How can we change this on the default site so that all new accounts are created with utf8?

Thanks,

5

Add this line to the Virtual Host Base File (/home/interworx/etc/vhost-base.conf):
AddDefaultCharset utf-8