karl wrote:
I have
text output coming from a database and ' (apostrophes) are shown in
the browser (IE6) as ? (question marks).
There's apostrophes and there are apostrophes. There's ASCII code 39,
there's Windows code page 1252 code 146, there's Unicode code
<mumble>.... The question is, which of these codes are in your
database? You must know the answer to that question before you can
decide how to proceed.
Character code handling in the database/Apache::ASP/Perl5/Apache/browser
chain is stranger than you probably expect. Here's a post I wrote a few
months back detailing two chains I've personally observed:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg01952.html
Notice that I saw two rather different translation chains on my two test
systems! Your particular configuration is quite different from either
of mine, so it could give yet a third path.
The only thing I can figure out is that
original output shows up as encoded Unicode (UTF-8) in the browser;
Don't guess, find out.
The way I did the analysis to make that post I linked to, I dumped the
text in question to a file at several places along the I/O chain, then I
examined each file. You should also use a network sniffer to see what
the HTTP headers and HTML data are without the browser getting in the
way. There's a good list of sniffers in the Winsock Programmer's FAQ,
if you don't have one already:
http://tangentsoft.net/wskfaq/
I think you'll find, as I did, that your characters are being translated
back and forth between ISO 8859-x and Unicode multiple times, and that
the last step isn't being done correctly.
That last step is critical because of the high probability that the
intermediate transformations are all lossless in your situation. All
you have to do is communicate to the browser what the final character
encoding is. In my particular situation, I had to change an Apache
setting to make it send a header informing the browser that the
character encoding was UTF-8. The browser was then able to display the
web page correctly, nevermind that the data was stored as ISO 8859-1
(Latin-1) in the database, and translated back and forth several times
along the path.
The only physical
difference I can find between the output generated by Apache::ASP
and IIS/ASP is that the Apache::ASP has Unix style LF line-endings
and the IIS/ASP has DOS/Windows style CRLF line-endings.
I'll bet you didn't compare the HTTP headers. Different web servers,
hence different headers, hence different browser interpretation.
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