298436 - FireFox ignores declaration charset IBM437

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[hartnegg]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; de-DE; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; de-DE; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

A Web page with the header-line 
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=IBM437" />
does not correctly display several characters, e.g. german umlaut 
with ASCII code 225 should display like &szlig; with that codepage.
It does work with charset=IBM850, only IBM437 fails, but I can not
use IBM850 because I need several more characters and those are only 
available in codepage 437.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. create html source with charset definition IBM850
&lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=IBM850" /&gt;
2. enter character with ascii code 225 in body
3. display the file in FireFox
4. change the charset definition to IBM437 and reload

Actual Results:  
looks like &aacute;


Expected Results:  
should look like &szlig;

Comment 1

[Adam Guthrie]

Would you like to create a testcase for this? Just attach an HTML file with the
appropriate contents.

Comment 2

[Josh Birnbaum]

->Core/Intl

Comment 3

[hartnegg]

Attachment: testcase

Comment 4

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

We never aimed or claimed to support every codepage listed in IANA. Do you have
a pressing requirement for IBM437 support, e.g. large quantities of legacy data?

For reference, Opera doesn't support it either. IE doesn't have it in the
encoding menu, but it recognizes it (as "OEM United States")

Comment 5

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

email from reporter:

I can't see how I can add another comment to this bug in bugzilla,
so I reply via e-mail:

All text files from DOS automatically use codepage 437, so they
can be trivially converted to html files by selecting this charset.

I just recently converted several dozend files this way, but then
we moved from IE to FireFox ... Now the files aren't displayed correctly.

I guess that I'm not the only person who has files with codepage 437
that must be converted to html and I think that support for this codepage
should be relatively easy, it probably is still buried so deeply inside
Windows that Microsoft will never be able to eliminate it completely.

Comment 6

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

It's not about ease of support.

It's about adding yet another codepage to Mozilla/Firefox and making everyone
pay the price for it even though very few people use it.

I would suggest mapping 437 to 850 and dealing with the fall out. For most
characters, they are close enough...

Comment 7

[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
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 8

[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.

Comment 10

[Dan Weiss]

I'd like to reopen this bug.  It's a two-minute job to fix it, but I'd prefer that someone experienced with the firefox codebase do the fix, because if I tried to add this in, it would take me a long time, and I might not do it correctly.

There are tons of .TXT files on various websites that need code page 437.  I don't want to hear any Unicode elitism about this.

Comment 11

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Not exactly a two minute job, though probably less than two hours. Can you provide a link to some of these websites with .TXT files that need code page 437? If I'm convinced that there is a use case for the code page, I will be happy to add support for it.

Comment 12

[Dan Weiss]

I could find several text files which rely on the single-box double-box joining characters:
http://db.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/file/beneath_a_steel_sky.txt
http://db.gamefaqs.com/coinop/arcade/file/killer_instinct_flow.txt
http://www.nesdev.com/2A03%20technical%20reference.txt

But all of these files exclusively used English text, and none of them used any characters which are found only in Code Page 437 and not Code Page 862 (DOS-Hebrew).

Comment 13

[Fernando Toledo]

I have same experience with thunderbird using nntp . I receive messages from Bulleting Board Systems that use IBM437 and thunderbird missing some part of text . I will report on TB bugzilla too.