Fixing Apache charset issues (?'s displaying instead of symbols)

A common problem with Apache on Redhat is an issue with displaying special characters (they come up as a ? instead of the proper symbol). The most common cause for this is that Redhat sets the default charset to UTF-8, while most content is instead encoded in ISO-8859-1 (or some other thing!)

The easy fix for this is to comment out:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

And restart apache (you can alternatively replace it with 'AddDefaultCharset Off').

If this fails, take a look at the content and set the default charset to whatever encoding is used in the problematic content.

Submitted by jkelly on Sat, 2006-08-26 06:31. categories [ | ] login or register to post comments