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Why does £ turn to A using xhtml and css

Answer 1

+3 A:

it sounds like you've got a page encoded in UTF-8, but being displayed as Latin-1 - make sure the meta tags and/or server headers tell browser what encoding the page uses.

In an XHTML file, you need to declare the encoding in the initial XML tag, and for maximum compatibility, include a meta tag also

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"&gt;

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8" />
    ...
  </head>

Bobince suggests in a comment that for maximum backwards compatibility you do something like this

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"&gt;

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
    ...
  </head>

If you're curious why you get strange letters, here's the likely explanation...

The pound sign is Unicode character U+00A3
This is encoded in UTF-8 as the two byte sequence C2 A3
if you interpreted that as Latin-1, you'd get Ã£

Paul Dixon 2010-07-13 12:27:40

You don't need the XML Declaration (XHTML files parsed as XML rather than HTML are UTF-8 by default), and you shouldn't include it as it will trip IE6 into Quirks Mode. If you are serving the file as `text/html` as most people do for IE compatility, the `Content-Type` meta should match that.

bobince 2010-07-13 12:42:35

Thanks - have modified answer.

Paul Dixon 2010-07-13 12:52:21

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Why does £ turn to A using xhtml and css

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