UTF-8 display (was: Re: a mug)

Tom Gewecke tom at bluesky.org
Tue Jul 21 09:00:45 CDT 2015


The IBM page seems to have an ellipsis character in UTF-8, with bytes E2 80 A6.  The web server is set to force all browsers to use the encoding iso-8859-1 regardless of what charset is stipulated in the html code.  The browser uses the Win 1252 equivalents and displays …

To see what a web server is forcing, if anything, you can use

http://web-sniffer.net/


On Jul 21, 2015, at 9:45 AM, Marcel Schneider wrote:

> 
> I fear things have grown somewhat upside down, so I'll try to outline the real scenario:
> 
> 1 - I open the page, the horizontal ellipsis is displayed as … (of course I don't know yet that it's a horizontal ellipsis...).
> 2 - I remember my comment about the T-shirt and decide to check whether it's accurate. Firefox shows me the page is in UTF-8 and that there is nothing after "Our apologies".
> 3 - After some trial and error, I save the page in Zotero and open the folder. The only HTML file inside is declared as Windows-1252, and there is the horizontal ellipsis.
> 4 - I back up the original file, try modifying the charset value to utf-8 and refresh the page, the … converts to a horizontal ellipsis.
> 
> To answer your questions, I figure out that the page was written on a Windows-1252 template but without sticking with this charset. U+2026 was probably an autocorrect. So it was "produced using UTF-8" but "the webmaster" must have published it under the old charset.
> 
> The puzzling point is that Firefox tried UTF-8 and told me he's serious, but "ate" the U+2026 while it used the native Windows-1252 to "display" it...
> 
> I hope that some macro could enable the "webmasters" to rapidly update websites, because resolving this "funny" "scenario" has cost me some "effort" today!
> 
> Marcel
> 




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