I've got a program on which I have non-ASCII characters which do not show properly on ISO-8859-1. Is there a way to use PHP and change the browser encoding somehow, and also allow the characters to display properly in the browser even though the encoding is ISO-8859-1?
Much Appreciated.
Use the header function to send an (explicit) HTTP Content-Type response header.
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1');
… replacing ISO-8859-1 with whatever encoding you are actually using. Hopefully that will be UTF-8.
you should use the header function
header( 'Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1');
Note: you should make sure no content have been sent to the browser or you can't modify the headers anymore, so I advise you to use this code as soon as possible in your script
The browser itself doesn't have an encoding. It supports many encodings and uses the one you tell it too. If you specify (in headers and/or HTML) that the encoding is ISO-8859-1, then your document should be in that encoding and you should make sure that all characters you send are in the right encoding. So you should actually send ISO-8859-1 characters. You cannot send a document that uses different encodings for different sections of the document.
For some characters, you may post an HTML entity instead. For instance é can be sent as é. This will work, regardless of encoding.
If you have the choice, I'd opt to use UTF-8. It supports any character and you don't have to worry about escaping diacritics or other special characters, except those that are special to HTML/XML itself.
Like others have said, using the header function:
header('Content-type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1');
or, if you want to serve valid XHTML files instead of the standard HTML:
header('Content-type: application/xml+xhtml; charset=ISO-8859-1');
It is possible to call the header later on in the script, unlike what RageZ said, but you will need to have enabled output buffering for that, using ob_start().
application/xml+xhtml there is no text/xhtml.