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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T15:25:03+00:00

I am building an online article website. I have a php script called view_article.php

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I am building an online article website. I have a php script called view_article.php that displays articles. The way the page knows what article to show is by using a $_GET variable in the URL.

For example:

/view_article.php?article_id=1  views article 1
/view_article.php?article_id=2  views article 2

Here’s the catch. In IE8 when I view article 1, the page displays fine, but when I view article 2, IE displays the page as blank. It’s running the same script so how/why is it displaying the page as blank?

Of the 4 computers I have tried this on, it can be reproduced 100% of the time on 2 of the 4 computers and it never happens on the other 2 computers. Firefox and Chrome have no problems displaying the pages.

I have all error messages turned on but nothing is displayed

Any ideas on why this is happening and how I can fix it? It is not only those article pages that aren’t working but other pages on the site don’t work as well (maybe 10% of about 50 different php script pages don’t work in IE8 consistenly on those 2 computers and one of those pages is my registration page). What can I do? I’m worried that 10% of my users won’t be able to access my website. The majority of users of the site will be using IE. Thanks for any suggestions

EDIT

View Source
Some helpful people suggested to view the source. Viewing the source on the computer that shows blank vs the computer that shows the page properly is almost identical except the computer that shows blank has some garbled characters that show after the last tag. I’m not doing anything to do with anything Turkish and also the computers giving me problems are in Taiwan and the browsers are in Mandarin (Chinese).

 ` ` ? ?¢F @ ? ? ? ??¨t?0 ?? ?�Ã? ? ? $ ? ???Psprog Psprog Regular Turkish uropean ðK? ¡I?$ W ? ` ` ? ?¢F @$? ? ? �ü ģ ?? ?�Ã? ? ? ? ???·s�ө��é ·s�ө��é Regular Turkish uropean ðK? ¡I? ? ` ` ¢D�¼ ?¢F @ ? ? ? ? �Ã? ? ? ?

HTTP Headers
Someone suggested examining the headers. I don’t really know what I’m looking for so I used web-sniffer. Here is the output:

HTTP REQUEST HEADERS
Connect to 66.147.230.147 on port 80 ... ok

GET /articles/trends HTTP/1.1[CRLF]
Host: www.example.com[CRLF]
Connection: close[CRLF]
User-Agent: Web-sniffer/1.0.29 (+http://web-sniffer.net/)[CRLF]
Accept-Encoding: gzip[CRLF]
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,UTF-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7[CRLF]
Cache-Control: no[CRLF]
Accept-Language: de,en;q=0.7,en-us;q=0.3[CRLF]
Referer: http://web-sniffer.net/[CRLF]
[CRLF]


HTTP RESPONSE HEADERS
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date:   Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:06:40 GMT   
Server: Apache/2.2.13 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.13 OpenSSL/0.9.8k DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635    
X-Powered-By:   PHP/5.2.9   
Expires:    Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT   
Cache-Control:  no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0  
Pragma: no-cache    
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=1e8520adc7a127590d4f59cb37ca0c98; path=/  
Connection: close   
Transfer-Encoding:  chunked 
Content-Type:   text/html
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Thanks everyone for your help. I ended up solving this problem after all. Here is what happened for those who wish to know the answer or have a similar problem:

    The website I am developing for is in Taiwan (and I’m a North American developer). This blank IE page was only happening on the computer in Taiwan using IE. I discovered that to replicate this test environment I had to switch my windows regional settings to Chinese (Taiwan). The allowed me to reproduce the bug on my local machine in canada.

    Next, I discovered the reason that IE was not displaying the page was because the default IE encoding was Chinese Traditional (Big5). The encoding needed to be switched to UTF-8 in order for the page to display.

    Therefore I forced the encoding on my .htaccess file by using: AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 (only specifying the charset in the meta tag in html did not work because it was already set to utf-8).

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