UTF-8, ANSI Coding.

I'm using the TM and R symbols, those should be recognized by UTF-8, no?  I mean if I write them like this, ® and ™ - than they will show up in both UTF-8 and ISO-5589.

But, anyway - I went on Dell's site, and they have the UTF-8 meta, and when I switch my browser to ISO-8859 on their site, their TM and R's signs mess up.  They only work in UTF-8... and that's what we want.  Here is a sample page:

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/pressoffice/en/2008/2008_09_08_rr_000?c=us&l=en&s=corp

Switch to ISO-5589 and you will see the TM and R, with foreign marks next to them.  I know you should be able to display TM and R in UTF-8, and that's what we need.  Converting the .asp files to UTF-8 helped some... because the TM and R will display when the browser is set to UTF-8, but the problem is that it doesn't happen everytime, only like 50% of the time.  The other half of the time, the TM and R have the invalid symbol, even though the browser is still set to UTF-8, see it doesn't make any sense.  The TM and R should show up everytime since we changed the encoding to UTF-8.  ARGH!  It's aggravating, because on our configuration pages, we use a lot of these TM and R - and the page looks like crap with all these invalid symbols.

Hi Jwl, I understand you are getting frustrated.  The recommendation I gave you is what I would consider the easiest way.   I tested it on our demo store. Trying to re-encode the page is a lot more work than is needed and may lead to other problems. Ultimately, you can display a trademark in UTF-8 or ISO-5589.  The character you use just has to match the declaration. 

I think the problem you were first explaining is that your &reg was being converted by the HTML editor.  To retain the &reg you need to type into the text box and not the HTML editor.  Then you can use UTF-8.

On the other hand, if you use the HTML editor and it is being converted you should use ISO-8859. 

So I recommend that you try one or the other.  Make sure the character you saved match te page declaration.  That works on our demo store and it will work for you as well.

EUREKA!  I figured out how to make it work.  Instead of trying to convert all the pages
to UTF-8... you just put the meta tag - but put it for the encoding in which the pages
are already encoded which is: ISO8859-1.  So put this tag in the header.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO8859-1" />

That's all you have to do to get rid of all the (r) and (tm) invalid symbols.

See, in IE7 - I think the browser automatically detects the encoding of the page 
even without a meta tag, but in FF3 - the default encoding is set at UTF-8 and 
unless you specify a meta tag FF won't switch to the proper encoding of the 
page and thus you get the invalid character symbols.

WOW... this was so aggravating me... and, it was so simple to fix.  I was 
wondering why FF didn't auto-detect the page encoding, like IE7 does - but, 
regardless - all you need to do is use the above meta-tag to tell FF3 which 
encoding to use for the page and FF3 will switch to that encoding.

WIN!

Edited by JWL - 27-September-2008 at 1:52am