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Why is IE failing to show UTF-8 encoded text?

Answer 1

+1 A:

Just a wild guess, but it might be a font issue. Maybe the fonts available to your browser can' represent said Chinese characters.

troelskn 2010-08-13 17:50:29

Answer 2

A:

This may be the same kind of thing that caused Rails 3 to add a snowman character to their output: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3222013/what-is-the-snowman-param-in-rails-3-forms-for

Jon Smock 2010-08-13 17:52:22

Answer 3

+1 A:

I can't explain this in detail. But this is indeed a known problem.

Here's a small reproducible code snippet:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
    <head><title>test</title></head>
    <body><p>&#65185;<br>0 0</p></body>
</html>

Save it in UTF-8 and view in IE8. You see nothing. Replace 0 0 by 00 and reload the page. It'll work fine! This is absolutely astonishing. Weirdly, replacing 0 0 by a a or the <br> by a </p><p> will fix it as well. It'll have something to do with failures in whitespace rendering.

Sorry, I don't have authorative resources proving this, but this is just another evidence IE8 isn't as good as we expect it is. Your best bet is to try to change the HTML and/or build it step by step so that it works at some point or when in vain, add the following meta tag to the head to force IE8 into IE7 mode:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

BalusC 2010-08-13 18:13:20

That's crazy! But, forcing IE 7 compatibility mode indeed works on the public side. Now I just have to figure out how to force compatibility mode inside the FCK Editor iframe so the user can actually edit the text. Thanks for the info!

mrdrbob 2010-08-16 21:00:27

Cheers! Much luck with this weird problem.

BalusC 2010-08-16 21:07:41

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Why is IE failing to show UTF-8 encoded text?

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