Just a note about a frustrating problem I bumped into this morning, and a question.
We have an intranet application that has been in use for several years that displays various information from our accounting system. While testing a few updates, I discovered some severe script errors on one page that no one had ever reported as a problem. When I viewed the page in the Microsoft Script De######, one of the test strings was in Chinese (maybe) and all the + signs disappeared from the concatenation operations.
Well, it turned out that because I never specified a particular character set in the page, the browser was picking up something from the database for this particular (varchar?) field that caused it to interpret the page as Unicode UTF-7, and that completely wrecked the scripts.
For this application, which only runs in IE because it requires NT credentials to access the server, I added this to each page at the top of the <head> section:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=Windows-1252">
That's "Western European (Windows)"; more IE-specific CHARSET strings are listed in HTML and Dynamic HTML > Reference > Character Set Recognition on MSDN.
Question: Is there is a standardized cross-browser solution?
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Thread: Script Errors and Character Set
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Super Moderator
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2004-04-19 22:32Script Errors and Character Set
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Silver Lounger
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2004-04-20 10:23Re: Script Errors and Character Set
I once built a multi-lingual application (English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, French, German). All of the data was stored in SQL Server in nvarchar fields. I was able to accommodate multiple browsers and languages by using serveral things:
ASP Side:
Response.CharSet = "utf-8"
Response.ContentType = "text/html"
HTML Side:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
As I recall, UTF-8 was the key. Once I added that to the mix, everything displayed perfectly - even in Netscape!
Hope this helps!<big><font color=blue>- M</big><font face="Comic Sans MS">ark</font face=comic><big>J -</big></font color=blue>
<IMG SRC=http://www.wopr.com/w3tuserpics/MarkJ_sig.gif border=0>
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Super Moderator
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2004-04-20 18:31Re: Script Errors and Character Set
Yup, UTF-8 CHARSET works, too...at least so far as avoiding those JavaScript errors. I'll have to check some other pages to see if it changes anything.
