French characters are not displaying correctly inside javascript grid

Question

We have translated one of our pages to french and all the html within the page displays flawlessly. That said, there is a javascript table (ext js) and the accented characters are not displaying correctly. The page is encoded UTF-8 in the HTML meta tags, but when I look inside FireBug, I see the following:

Accept-Charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

I'm guessing the problem is related to the ISO-8859-1 having worked its way back in. Does anyone know why the page itself would display fine, but the text inside the javascript component wouldn't? Do you somehow specify the encoding separately for the javascript files?

Answer 1

It's possible that the ext. JS file strips out unrecognised characters as a security precaution.

The "Accept-Charset" header can be specified in a number of places, including as an attribute in certain HTML elements. Have you performed a search for Accept-Charset (case insensitive) in the offending file?

Answer 2

The Accept-Charset tag gives a set of encodings that are accepted -- if all the data sent is encoded UTF-8, then don't worry about it.

Can you elaborate on exactly what is happening?

1. You say "javascript table" -- I presume you are constructing an HTML table in JS and placing it in the DOM? Please elaborate, especially w.r.t. any character conversions. Are you building HTML text or building with DOM elements with attributes?
2. Where does the JS get its data? If with AJAX, have you verified the Encoding for that page?
3. Does the JS use encode() or decode()? Those don't handle UTF-8 correctly.

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EDIT:

• Type the URL to the JS code in your browser, and look at "Page Info" to see its encoding. I'll bet it is ISO-8859-1, which would explain the header problems.

• Next, check the encoding of the AJAX data. If it's dynamically created you can:

  1. Enable "Show XMLHttpRequests" in FireBug's console,
  2. Load on your base HTML page,
  3. Open the FireBug console tab,
  4. Expand the AJAX GET/POST request and open the Response sub-tab,
  5. Check the Encoding for the data, and fix as needed.

BTW, I'm having similar problems and haven't entirely ironed out the issues (still not sure the source data isn't badly encoded).