Why are accented characters rendering inconsistently when accessing the same code on the same server at a different URL?

Question

There is a page on our server that's reachable via two different URLs.

http://www.spotlight.com/6213-5613-0721

http://www.spotlight.com/interactive/cv/1/M103546.html

There's classic ASP behind the scenes, and both of those URLs actually do a Server.Transfer to the same underlying ASP page.

The accents in the name at the top of the page are rendering correctly on one URL and incorrectly on the other - but as far as I can tell, the two requests are returning identical responses (same markup, same headers, same everything) - and I have absolutely no idea why one URL should be rendering correctly whilst the other is corrupting the accented characters.

Is there anything else (content encoding?) that I should be examining - and if so, how can I tell what's being returned beyond the information displayed in Firebug?

Answer 1

I have checked the character encoding in your headers and meta tags and they are consistent across both pages. I also agree that the output of the pages is largely similar - except for the special characters, which are "messed up" in the source file.

I don't think this issue exists in the browser, the must be something behind the scenes that causes this. How does the name containing these characters get from the data store to the page?

Answer 2

I been in this problem in the past and the problem was that some file (maybe the asp file that do the transfer or some include) is not saved as ANSI.

Check that all files involved in the request has the same encoding in the server (try File -> Save As With Encoding)