184778 - international characters not displaying properly (accents/etc)

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[Jorge Asch]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130

When Mozilla encounters access or international characters in a HTML file it's
not displaying properly (it displays a question mark instead). I know the
correct syntax is é instead of just "é", but still, it works on previous
versions and other browsers (Mozilla 1.0, Netcape, Internet Explorers).

And there are lots of sites out there that do not comform to good html writing.
Specially in non-english languages...

A weird note. Sometimes they display OK... (about 20% of the time). Not sure
what causes them to display OK or not, even tough the HTML is unchanged.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. open page 
2. look for accents in header below image
3. find ?'s intead



Expected Results:  
á instead of ?
ñ instead of ?
you get the picture

Comment 1

[Jorge Asch]

Well, even tough I type the correct accents on the MEMO box, they don't show up
properly on the Description History of the problem...

Try this: ALT-164 ñ (shows two characters). ALT-130 é (should be an "e" with accent)

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

That site worksforme, linux trunk build 2002-12-09-22.

What are your charset autodetect settings?

Comment 3

[Jorge Asch]

Attachment: This is how I see the page... on both of my workstations.

Comment 4

[Yuying Long]

This works for me on WinXP / 12-10 trunk build with both auto-detect OFF and
auto-detect Universal.

Reporter: what is your browser default charset? when you saw the problem, does
the charset is marked as your browser default charset?

Can you try to clear Cache (Edit | Preferences | Advanced | Cache) or create a
new profile to see if you can reproduce it?

Comment 5

[Jorge Asch]

If I clear the cache the problem is solved... but after several minutes/hours it
goes back to not showing them properly.

Comment 6

[Yuying Long]

Well, if you never go to pages other than western charset page, then the
different charset never be cached.  But if you visit some pages which has
different charset like UTF-8 or whatever else, then cache will remember, and
this will help if you go to the same page next time.

Since the page that you mentioned: http://www.cidgallup.com/ doesn't has html
charset meta-tag, so it could be affected by cache.  But if you clear the cache
or manually select the correct one, then next time when you visit that page
again, the page will be displayed properly.

It's a correct behavior for me.

Comment 7

[Jorge Asch]

Hmm. I still wonder why with 1.0 or 1.1 I never had this problem. I also noticed
it's not only accents/etc, but also Copyright and Registered signs among others...

Comment 8

[henning petersen]

For page http://aninhadinamarca.weblogger.terra.com.br/ I have to set character 
coding' to Unicode UTF-8 before seeing this page correct. 

This goes for both Linux (Mozilla 1.7.3) and Windows (some older version)

Internet Explorer shows it correct.

PS: I know this is an old thread, but the issue covers exactly my problem.

Comment 9

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

(In reply to comment #8)
http://aninhadinamarca.weblogger.terra.com.br/ is declared as ISO-8859-1 in the
HTTP headers but is in fact in UTF-8. This is the same as issue as bug 236325
(and others, probably)

Comment 10

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
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Comment 11

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.