On Fri, 23 Apr 2010, Florin Iucha wrote: > On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 01:16:37PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote: > >>>> I was having the same problem on both machines until I added this >>>> line in the header: >>>> >>>> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> >>>> >>>> That only fixed it on one Apache web server, not the other. So why >>>> doesn't that fix it for both servers? I assume it has something to >>>> do with the Apache configuration. Any ideas? >>> >>> That line is interpreted by the browser, the server doesn't care. >> >> That's what I thought, but then I thought the browser would use the >> information to decide how to display the file. > > Correct. I wonder why the meta line isn't working then, because... >> Are you saying that the server is actually altering the file as it >> sends it out? > > It might, based on the directives in its configuration files > (httpd.conf, .htaccess). > > To test that hypothesis, fetch the file with wget from both servers and > do a diff. OK. I did it and the wget-retrieved files are identical. >>>> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> >>>> >>>> Do you know why I'm not able to override the default here? >>> >>> You need to override in in a .htaccess file, not in the file that you >>> actually send out. >> >> Do you know what I need to do? I went here... >> >> http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-htaccess-charset >> >> ...and tried this,... >> >> $ cat > .htaccess >> AddCharset UTF-8 .html >> ^D >> >> ...which made a .htaccess file, but it didn't change the appearance of the >> document. > > You probably need to enable .htaccess processing in the main httpd.conf > file and also specify that for the given directory, what directives can > be specified in the .htaccess file. > > http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/howto/htaccess.html OK. This means I have to get the sysadmin in on it. I don't want to do that, so I'm going to try iconv: iconv --from-code=UTF-8 --to-code=ISO-8859-1 gaw15_problem_3_papers.html | grep -v "<meta" > gaw15_test.html It works! before: http://genetsim.org/class/gaw15_problem_3_papers.html after: http://genetsim.org/class/gaw15_test.html There's a solution. Not the one I wanted, but good enough for now. I'm still in a quandry over why Firefox doesn't see the meta tag and display the utf-8 correctly. It worked on one system and not the other. Thanks again, Florin! Mike