UTF-16 Encoding

IUsedToBeAnIdiot · Post by **IUsedToBeAnIdiot** » March 5th, 2005, 3:03 pm

I have set firefox to auto-detect unversal encoding. Now, Firefox has a habit of reading a page in UTF-16 when it only appears correctly in UTF-8. Sometimes, firefox displays things in ISO-8859-1 when it would display just as well in UTF-8, while universal is its auto-detect mode.

monkeyman · Post by **monkeyman** » March 5th, 2005, 3:10 pm

When you do that you have a bunch of things working against you. Unicode detection in Firefox isn't all that great, both Windows 2000 and Windows XP have cobbled together unicode font support that sometimes goes awry for no particular reason and then you have pages with broken or missing headers. Because of those factors, it's not a great idea to rely on auto-detection for UTF fonts.

IUsedToBeAnIdiot · Post by **IUsedToBeAnIdiot** » March 10th, 2005, 9:14 am

I have disabled auto detect and have selected UTF-8 as my encoding method. I have also removed UTF-16 from the active encoding list. But when I use Firefox, UTF-16 is STILL selected by default, and when I change the seting to UTF-8, it pops back to 16 when I go to the next site! Its very annoying having to reset my encoding settings every time I go to a new URL.

monkeyman · Post by **monkeyman** » March 10th, 2005, 1:22 pm

Is that weird or what? Maybe one of these three settings are borked in about:config (I have included the default values):

network.standard-url.encode-utf8 false
network.standard-url.escape-utf8 true
prefs.converted-to-utf8 false

IUsedToBeAnIdiot · Post by **IUsedToBeAnIdiot** » March 10th, 2005, 5:20 pm

how would I check those vlues? (what is about:config)?

monkeyman · Post by **monkeyman** » March 10th, 2005, 5:33 pm

Type about:config in the Urlbar (address bar) and type utf8 in the find field when about:config comes up.

IUsedToBeAnIdiot · Post by **IUsedToBeAnIdiot** » March 10th, 2005, 8:21 pm

all of these settings are correct already. any other ideas?

monkeyman · Post by **monkeyman** » March 10th, 2005, 8:28 pm

Geeze, I was hoping that was it. I'm afraid I'm out of ideas, sorry. I guess it's down to the last resort and you'll have to backup your profile, delete the old one and start again. Profile Backup