Foreign Language Character Sets Not Displaying Properly

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hennesseystealth
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Foreign Language Character Sets Not Displaying Properly

Post by hennesseystealth » 2017/02/27 19:40:05

Please excuse me if this question seems trivial, but I am not an expert in these matters. We moved from Verio to Network Solutions VPS. NS is running CentOS 6.8. I don't know what Verio was running other than our interface was cPanel and now it is Plesk. The issue is we have web pages that include character sets for Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish. For 17 years these pages displayed perfectly on two different Verio VPS platforms.

Now, on the new VPS, these languages show non-sense or best case a black diamond with a ? in the middle. As an example, the original statement for our Spanish pages was <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">. We were told to try utf-8, but that made no difference.

In order to get these languages to display correctly, do we need to install something extra on the server?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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avij
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Re: Foreign Language Character Sets Not Displaying Properly

Post by avij » 2017/02/27 19:46:59

I believe you should set AddDefaultCharset in your httpd config to something that matches the encoding of your current pages. Obviously this depends on which web server software you are running. AddDefaultCharset is for Apache httpd, other software will have that setting by some other name.

Neither cPanel nor Plesk are not supported on this forum, so you should ask further instructions from Plesk or Network Solutions for how to implement the change.

hennesseystealth
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Re: Foreign Language Character Sets Not Displaying Properly

Post by hennesseystealth » 2017/02/27 20:15:24

Thank you for your quick reply. I will talk to NS on this topic, but I had one follow up question. Since we need to support 5 different languages, does your description of AddDefaultCharset only allow a single default for the entire site, or do we have the ability to specify many or by page?

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avij
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Re: Foreign Language Character Sets Not Displaying Properly

Post by avij » 2017/02/27 21:12:28

AddDefaultCharset can be set globally, per virtual host, per directory or in a .htaccess file.

A longer term solution would be to convert all your non-UTF-8 pages to UTF-8. I can't imagine anyone using different charsets in this day and age. We switched our multilingual website (not related to CentOS) to UTF-8 more than a decade ago and haven't looked back.

hennesseystealth
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Re: Foreign Language Character Sets Not Displaying Properly

Post by hennesseystealth » 2017/02/27 21:38:49

I found a solution for my Spanish pages. I had to do 2 things. 1) change the meta statement from Windows to utf-8 and 2) this was the important part, open the files in Note Pad and then "save as" using the encoding of utf-8 and NOT the default of ANSI. I hope something similar works for Asian character sets like big-5.

Thanks again.

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