Special characters not displaying correctly in a Javascript string

Question

I have a function that assigns a string containing specials characters into a variable, then passes that variable to a DOM element via innerHTML property, but it prints strange characters. Let's say I code this...

someText = "äêíøù";
document.getElementById("someElement").innerHTML = someText;

It prints the following text...

Ã¤ÃªÃÃ¸Ã¹

I know how to use the entity names to prevent this, but when I use them to pass the value through a Javascript method, they print literally.

Save all files as UTF8 without BOM, set the charset to UTF8 and make sure everything that could possibly have a character encoding is set to UTF8 — adeneo
– adeneo, Commented Jan 18, 2014 at 22:23
"Save all files as UTF8 without BOM..." There's no reason they have to not have a BOM. — T.J. Crowder
– T.J. Crowder, Commented Jan 18, 2014 at 22:24
@T.J.Crowder - Don't like the byte order mark much, and some editors still adds that crap. Generally there's an option to save as "without BOM", I was just implying to choose that one. My editor doesn't have issues like this, so it's been a long time since I've had to fiddle with that stuff — adeneo
– adeneo, Commented Jan 18, 2014 at 22:25

T.J. Crowder · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-18 22:24:05Z

4

This means that you have a conflict of encodings. Your JavaScript and your HTML are being served to the browser with different encodings/character sets. Ensure that they're encoded in and served with the same encoding / character set (UTF8 is a good choice) to make sure that characters are correctly interpreted.

Obligatory link: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

answered Jan 18, 2014 at 22:24

T.J. Crowder

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