Character Encoding

[Qwertz]

I know David's busy trying to resurrect the damaged site. This might just be my browser.

Has anyone else had a problem getting their browser to correctly switch from ISO-8859-1 (Western) encoding to UTF-8 (Unicode)? Neither IE's nor Firefox' built in encoding autodetect seems to want to correctly detect the Unicode character encoding. The upshot is a bunch of funky character codes interspersed where non-standard characters should be, both on the main page and in the forums, and my having to (laboriously and with much consternation, wailing and gnashing of teeth) manually select Unicode encoding.

Or is it just me?

-Q

[softwareNerd]

Do you see these in a particular post or all over the place? If a particular post, give us a link.

[Qwertz]

I see it all over the place, wherever special characters are used. Most frequently, I see it on the main page in metablog entries posted there, as they tend to use "smart quotes" instead of "regular quotes." But to point out an example, I'll use Sebasti�n (http://forum.ObjectivismOnline.com/index.php?showuser=2387) whose username shows as "Sebastián" until I switch the encoding.

-Q

PS: I just realized the above only reads correctly in western encoding. Here:

Western:

Unicode:

[DavidOdden]

Do you see these in a particular post or all over the place? If a particular post, give us a link.

Here is a case and a non-case. The first should have o-umlaut in Goedel's name; the second which works has the word "circle" in Russian (in Cyrillic) and the Chinese character for "circle". It's sort of surprising that the most heavy-duty example of funny encoding actually works.

[softwareNerd]

Thanks for the examples. It is easy enough to change the forum setting to use UTF-8.

GreedyCapitalist, Do you know if that was the setting on the previous site?

[DavidV]

No, but changing the setting to UTF-8 appears to have fixed things.

[Qwertz]

So it does! Nifty-keen. Thanks.

-Q

[Lemuel]

What about ...

< Rockwell’s and Steven’s >

... instead of

< Rockwell's and Steven's >

It's a jump-up regarding the browser I use - sometimes Safari, sometimes Firefox, mostly Opera - but the single apostrophe seems to always give me < ’ >.

Is there a setting I need to change?

[Spano]

In Opera, try setting the encoding to UTF-8 under view/encoding. By default, Opera appears to render the site in Western, which gives those funky characters instead of the correct ones.

[DavidV]

The encoding problem with the blog posts has to do with pasting from MS Word. This is something we need to fix in the post rather than set in the browser.

[softwareNerd]

This is a good opportunity to explain...

Folks using MS-Word to edit before posting here (or to other web sites, blogs, etc.) would be well advised to stick to plain old "straight quotes". Though MS-Word 's "curly quotes" look nicer, the underlying encoding is non-standard. So, when text with curly quotes is cut and pasted into something other than MS-Word, they often display incorrectly.

To set up MS-Word (2000) so that it sticks to "straight quotes", use the Tools/Auto Correct menu option. In the tab labelled "Autoformat as you Type" look for the check-box that asks if you want to replace "Straight quotes with smart quotes". UNCHECK the box. Text typed subsequently will have regular quotes.

If you want to replace existing "smart quotes", check the Help; there's a way to do that.

[Spano]

Another possibility is to edit in Word for spell checking, then copy and paste into notepad, then copy and paste from notepad to the browser. The idea being that notepad would sanitize the encoding for you.