Encoding error on just one server

Question

I run several servers, one for development, one for client testing and another for production. I have a character encoding issue (the old "question marks in diamonds" appearing instead of accented characters), but only on one of these servers. The PHP pages are identical on all 3 servers, and the servers are all set up to be as similar as possible (Macports MAMP Mac Minis). Here are the first few lines showing the encoding used:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
    <title>Biography Generator</title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">

There is no database in play, just straight HTML and PHP. Yes, it's obsolete technology. My client makes the encoding and HTML4 decisions, not me. I just have to make this work. What server configuration details might cause this?

Can you check if the server is sending content encoding headers like "Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8"? You can view the headers in the browser Developer tools or by opening the page with curl -v ... — Dobromir Velev, Jan 14 '21 at 09:13
You can change this with the AddDefaultCharset directive in apache config or .htaccess — Dobromir Velev, Jan 14 '21 at 09:16

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 14 '21 at 21:32

0

This turned out to be set in the php.ini file. I had to change:

default_charset = "UTF-8"

to:

default_charset = ""

Commenting the line out did not fix it, I had to set it to an empty string.

answered Jan 14 '21 at 21:32

John Korchok

131
5

Encoding error on just one server

1 Answers1