Question

I spent the last few hours getting my website to validate HTML 4.01 Strict and I actually have succeeded in that, but there is still one warning which I can’t get rid of. The warning is:

Character Encoding mismatch!

The character encoding specified in
the HTTP header (iso-8859-1) is
different from the value in the
element (utf-8). I will use the value
from the HTTP header (iso-8859-1) for
this validation.

The page in question is http://www.dubiousarray.net/default.html. As you can see from the page source I have the following meta element:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">

and I have made sure that the default.html file is saved with UTF-8 encoding. The strange thing is all the other pages in the site validate without this warning and they have the same meta tag and were saved in exactly the same way. I am pretty sure it is something to do with the server configuration. The .htaccess file looks like this at the moment:

# Use PHP 5 as default
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

But I have tried all the fixes shown on this page and none of them worked. How can I go about getting rid of this warning?

In Firefox, if you right click on the page and select ‘View Page Info’, default.html shows as ISO-8859-1, while all the other pages show UTF-8.

All the html file have been created and saved in the exact same way (character encoding set to UTF-8 without BOM), but default.html is the only one which isn’t displaying as UTF-8. So I assume the server is doing something special to the default.html file though I am not sure what as there is not sign of it in the .htaccess file.

Answer 1

You need to replace the HTTP-level header.

This should work:

<?php
    header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
?>

Note that the above must be the first thing in your file. No exceptions. See header.

For general information on how to change the character set header in different web stacks, see Setting the HTTP charset parameter.