OnPage Issues with UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1

[jmueller]

Hi guys,

I hope somebody can help me figure this out. On one of my sites I set the charset to UTF-8 in the content-type meta-tag. The file itself is also UTF-8. If I type german special chars like ä, ö, ß and the like they get displayed as a tilted square with a questionmark inside.

If I change the charset to iso-8859-1 they are getting displayed properly in the browser but services like twitter are still having the issues and stop "importing" content once they reach one of those specialchars.

I would like to avoid having to htmlencode all on-page content, so my preference would be using UTF-8..

You can see it in action when you visit this URL for example: http://www.skgbickenbach.de/aktive/1b/artikel/40-minuten-fußball-reichen-nicht_1045?charset=utf-8

Remove the ?charset parameter and the charset it set to iso-8859-1.

Hope somebody has an answer or can push me into the right direction.

Thanks in advance and have a great day all.

Jan

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Jan,

I'm following up on old questions. Did Theo's answer solve your problem for you?

[Hondaspeder]

Wow good answer!

[Theo-NL]

Getting a web page to display your content as TRUE utf-8 requires everything to be set at the utf-8 encoding. 'Everything' includes: your database, your database tables, your database fields, your connection from php to your database, you header as set by php, your header as set by html, your content itself etc.

The following resources were extremely helpful to me when I was switching to utf-8 (which is by far the better encoding over ISO):

http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/utf-8

http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/utf-8/mysql

Bonus tip: make sure your content and files are saved as utf-8 without BOM (Byte Order Mark), this will save you lots of trouble later!