Hi everyone, I just ran into a glitch that got me wondering about the proper encoding to use when outputting data for non-technical folks.
I took pains to ensure that I converted a number of XML feeds to UTF-8 prior to storage in a database. And then, when pulling the feed data from a database to generate an HTML file, I once again was careful to write the data to the HTML file using UTF-8. The problem I stumbled into is that when I used UTF-8, several characters showed up as gobbledygook in my Firefox browser. Specifically, the characters "\u201c" and "\u201d" (quote marks) were not carrying over. Some googling revealed that I should change my browser's default character set. I switched form Western ISO to UTF-8, and sure enough, the quote marks appeared correctly. My concern now is that this "solution" is far from obvious. The data is intended to be emailed as an HTML attachment to numerous non-technical folks in my office in America, and they likely have no idea about browser encodings and the ability to change them. So the question -- given my target audience, is there a particular encoding (such as Windows-1252) that would guarantee the file would render properly in the most browsers? Or is it better to always use UTF-8 and let people figure things out for themselves? With the latter, I worry that the file will appear like sloppy work when in fact it's a just a browser setting issue.... Advice is greatly appreciated! Serdar _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
