Writing accented characters into HTML files?

Ruby
1

I’m having trouble when I write accented characters into HTML files;
though the accents appear properly in my terminal, they are badly
“messed up” in the HTML output. CGI.escape doesn’t fix the problem,
because these are not “special” characters line < or >, but simply
accented e’s, o’s, etc. I’m assuming the problem has something to do
with a character set type mismatch between the file Ruby is writing
and what the browser (Firefox) expects, but I’m at a loss as to how to
correct it.

Any advice most appreciated,
Thanks,
Ken

2

Look into using a reference. Valid references are dependent on the
version of the HTML used.

Gerald

3

Kenneth McDonald wrote:

Any advice most appreciated,

Use hexdump -C on the file to see what the actual byte sequences are. If
these are single-byte characters then it’s probably ISO-8859-1. If they
are two bytes then it’s probably UTF-8.

You can use an XML declaration and/or a tag in the section
to tell the browser which character set your document is in, and/or get
your web server to set the correct charset in the Content-Type header.

4

On Jan 6, 2009, at 3:20 AM, Brian C. wrote:

Kenneth McDonald wrote:

Any advice most appreciated,

Use hexdump -C on the file to see what the actual byte sequences
are. If
these are single-byte characters then it’s probably ISO-8859-1. If
they
are two bytes then it’s probably UTF-8.

I have some code that detects valid UTF-8 data here:

http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/the_unicode_character_set_and_encodings#comment_14649

James Edward G. II

5

Kenneth McDonald said…

I’m having trouble when I write accented characters into HTML files;
though the accents appear properly in my terminal, they are badly
“messed up” in the HTML output. CGI.escape doesn’t fix the problem,
because these are not “special” characters line < or >, but simply
accented e’s, o’s, etc. I’m assuming the problem has something to do
with a character set type mismatch between the file Ruby is writing
and what the browser (Firefox) expects, but I’m at a loss as to how to
correct it.

Any advice most appreciated,

Start by ensuring that you have the following at the top of

Also, post the “messed up” characters; they’ll tell us something about
the encoding problem.

Oh, and make sure your editor is writing utf-8.