Question

So I know this is a common problem with stuff like the charset, but the weird thing is that this works on a page with the same set-up/template, but not on this one!

So basically, my problem is that the page won’t show Norwegian characters like å and ø.

Here’s the page with the problem: http://suldal.underbakke.net/register.php
and here’s one with the same template but working: http://suldal.underbakke.net/

(On the second one, it’s a “å” in 4th post, in the name)

Answer 1

The page is declared as being in UTF-8 encoding, but it is in fact windows-1252 (or iso-8859-1) encoded. You can see this by manually selecting the encoding while viewing the page in a browser; browsers typically have a View menu where you can select the encoding.

Thus, as a quick fix, you could just change utf-8 to windows-1252 in the meta tag.

As a different workaround, you could replace the “special characters” (Scandinavian letters) by HTML entities, e.g. “ø” by ø. Depending on the authoring software, you might need to do something special to achieve this (e.g., enter “HTML mode”), because an authoring tool might automatically convert “&” to &.

As the best solution, find out how to save a file in UTF-8 encoding in the authoring program you are using, and keep the meta tag as is. This is typically either an option in the general settings of the program or a choice you can make in a “Save As” command.