On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 03:21:21PM +0000, Eur Ing Chris Green wrote:
When I view text files in Firefox any pound signs (as in UK currency, not #) are shown as a ? and quite a few subsequent characters are lost.
Pound signs in HTML are fine.
Does anyone have any idea why this might be? Is it a browser issue or a web server issue (this is text files being served by apache on my home Linux box)?
This is really wierd!
It depends how many pound signs there are, what follows them, etc.
I have set some test files up on my server, I'd be interested to know if others see the same effects (I think they will as I believe they're caused by the apache server, not the browser).
http://home.isbd.net/chris/xxx.txt Renders as I would expect, even though it has a string of pound signs. Page info says it's windows-1253 encoding.
http://home.isbd.net/chris/testPounds1.txt Renders OK (only one pound sign) but in a slightly larger size font than the one above. Says it's windows-1252 encoding.
http://home.isbd.net/chris/testPounds2.txt Shows ? for the pound sign and loses several characters after the pound sign, uses an even bigger font! Page info says it's gb18030 encoding.
I suppose apache is trying to guess the encoding by some sort of heuristic and getting things somewhat wrong. Does anyone have any idea where/how apache does this?