How to Properly Display German Characters in HTML

How can I properly display German characters in HTML?

It seems you need some basic explanations about something that unfortunately even most programmers don't understand properly.

Files like your HTML page are saved and transmitted over the Internet as a sequence of bytes, but you want them displayed as characters. In order to translate bytes into characters, you need a set of rules called a character encoding. Unfortunately, there are many different character encodings that have historically emerged to handle different languages. Most of them are based on the American ASCII encoding, but as soon as you have characters outside of ASCII such as German umlauts, you need to be very careful about which encoding you use.

The source of your problem is that in order to correctly decode an HTML file, the browser needs to know which encoding to use. You can tell it so in several ways:

• The "Content-Type" HTTP header
• The HTML META tag
• The XML encoding attribute if you use XHTML

So you need to pick one encoding, save the HTML file using that encoding, and make sure that you declare that encoding in at least one of the ways listed above (and if you use more than one make damn sure they agree). As for what encoding to use, Germans often use ISO/IEC 8859-15, but UTF-8 is increasingly becoming the norm, and can handle any kind of non-ASCII characters at the same time.

Browser display german language character issue

Hi I have find answer myself

Data comes from db using php server side scripting thats why html meta tag not working but we can do it using php header. please check below one line of code to do it.

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1');

Why do my German Umlaut characters not get displayed correctly when content is dynamically loaded?

broken = they are showing as "?" question marks

This means most likely that you are fetching the characters as latin1 in your remote script, and displaying them in a UTF-8 context. (The default encoding for Ajax requests is UTF-8.)

Check out UTF-8 all the way through and make sure you are using UTF-8 everywhere. If the Ajax script fetches data from a database, make sure you explicitly set the encoding.

---

Related Topics