How do I get foreign characters in a select/dropdown list to display properly in IE 7?

Question

I have tested in IE6, Firefox 3.0.5 and Chrome and they all work. In IE7 it displays as boxes.

For example:

<select name="selectact" id="selectact">
<option value="page" selected="selected">网 页</option> 
<option value="news">新 闻</option> 
<option value="trade">行 业</option> 
<option value="area">区 域</option> 
<option value="web">网 站</option> 
<option value="image">图 片</option> 
<option value="mp3">MP3</option> 
<option value="flash">Flash</option> 
<option value="bbs">论坛</option> 
</select>

Note: Characters display ok on the page, just no in drop down

Answer 1

Did you try validating the page? Among other things, that will verify you're specifying a character encoding and only byte sequences that are valid in that encoding.

Answer 2

You'll need to specify the correct character encoding. Assuming that is Chinese text, you would insert the following meta tag into the head of your document:

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-2022-cn">

A full list of character sets can be found here.

Answer 3

any progress with this?

I have the exact same problem. Please tell me your solution if you found one.