Question

I want to read a file from my server with javascript and display it’s content in a html page.
The file is in ANSI charset, and it has romanian characters.. I want to display those characters in the way they are 😀 not in different black symbols..

So I think my problem is the charset.. I have a get request that takes the content of the file, like this:

function IO(U, V) {//LA MOD String Version. A tiny ajax library.  by, DanDavis
var X = !window.XMLHttpRequest ? new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP') : new XMLHttpRequest();
X.open(V ? 'PUT' : 'GET', U, false );
X.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'Charset=UTF-8');
X.send(V ? V : '');return X.responseText;}

As far as I know the romanian characters are included in UTF-8 charset so I set the charset of the request header to utf-8.. the file is in utf-8 format and I have the meta tag that tells the browser that the page has utf-8 content..

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

So if I query the server the direct file, the browser shows me the romanian characters but if I display the content of the page through this script, I see only symbols instead of characters..
So what I am doing wrong?

Thank you!

PS: I want this to work on Firefox at least not necessarily in all browsers..

Answer 1

While my initial assumption was the same as T.J. Crowder’s, a quick chat established that the OP uses some hosting service and cannot easily change the Content-Type headers.

The files were sent as text/plain or text/html without any Charset paramter, hence the browser interprets them as UTF-8 (which is the default).

So saving the files in UTF-8 (instead of ANSI/Windows-1252) did the trick.