Help: why are my £s coming up as ës ?

[robertsaunders]

I am designing a webdite for a friend in which I have included a table of her rates in £s (GBP signs). On my computer I see them as GB pound signs, but on hers she sees them as ë signs.
Here is the page in quesiton:
www.elenadearden.com/rates.htm

Any suggestions why this might be, and how I can correct it?

She sees pound signs at the following page http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/st...518292,00.html and I have tried copying and pasting the the symbols from the source HTML into her page but it doesn't seem to help. I am really stuck on this one and would really appreciate your help.

[mwinter]

On my computer I see [symbols] as GB pound signs, but on hers she sees them as ë signs.
Here is the page in quesiton:
www.elenadearden.com/rates.htm

Any suggestions why this might be, and how I can correct it?

Either you, or your host, have misconfigured the server and it's not sending character encoding information. This means that the user agent has to guess the representation. Different users will have different settings, and user agents will vary in how they make that guess.

The best solution would be to modify the server configuration, either globally or for this site in particular, with the following directive:

  AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1

If the host refuses to modify the configuration, you could also set that in a .htaccess file.

The final recourse is to add a meta element to each (and every) HTML document:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

I would think Latin-1 would be a suitable encoding; everything's in English, after all.

She sees pound signs at the following page http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/st...518292,00.html

The Guardian haven't configured their server properly either, but they have used a meta element. However, this is a substandard solution.

I have tried copying and pasting the the symbols from the source HTML into her page but it doesn't seem to help.

The characters you have are correct (U+00A3), but as I said, they're being interpreted wrong.

By the way, I don't either of the characters you've listed. Under my configuration, Firefox is guessing a Chinese character encoding, so I get complete junk (a question mark in a rhombus).

Mike

[robertsaunders]

Thanks for your reply Mike. Unfortunately, every time I ask a q my ignorance is exposed!

The best solution would be to modify the server configuration, either globally or for this site in particular, with the following directive:

**AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1

How would I set about doing this? I've emailed my host, but can I do it myself?

If the host refuses to modify the configuration, you could also set that in a .htaccess file.

Wouldn't know where to start, but hopefully won't be necessary!

The final recourse is to add a meta element to each (and every) HTML document:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

I would think Latin-1 would be a suitable encoding; everything's in English, after all.

OK I think I've done that right - can you tell me whether you see the £ signs now at www.elenadearden.com/rates.htm ?

[jscheuer1]

I see them, but I didn't look before so, how would I know if it was any different?

[mwinter]

The best solution would be to modify the server configuration [...]

How would I set about doing this? I've emailed my host, but can I do it myself?

Unless you have access to the server configuration, you can't. As you seem to be using a third party for hosting, I very much doubt you'll have the ability to make the changes yourself. However, it's a very simple change if they know how to administer Apache.

If the host refuses to modify the configuration, you could also set that in a .htaccess file.

Wouldn't know where to start, but hopefully won't be necessary!

It really isn't hard at all. You just need to create a plain text file with the AddDefaultCharset declaration I included, then save it as .htaccess (that is, (dot)htaccess) in the root directory of the site. Assuming the host hasn't disabled over-rides, the server will apply that directive whenever it has to serve something from your site.

The final recourse is to add a meta element [...]

OK I think I've done that right [...]

Yes, you did. However, sending the proper headers is a better solution, but a solution is better than none, after all.

Mike