Displaying foreign characters

[amri]

Hello all,
I want to know how to display foreign characters such as Chinese, Japanese or Arabic in HTML page.
Thank you very much

[chris_fuel]

That depends on your server encoding really. If it's UTF8 you should be fairly ok. I haven't really seen an issue, and sites like mixi inline it:

<title>ソーシャル・ネットワーキングサイト [mixi(ミクシィ)]</title>

[xhtmlcoder]

It can depends on the fonts installed on the users system but the encoding is a major factor.

[AutisticCuckoo]

You can either use an encoding that allows you to have the literal characters in your document (like UTF-8), or you can use numeric character references (&#xxxxx;).

You also need to specify one or more font families that include glyphs for those characters (using CSS).

Your visitors must have at least one of those fonts installed in order to actually see anything useful.

[amri]

That depends on your server encoding really. If it's UTF8 you should be fairly ok. I haven't really seen an issue, and sites like mixi inline it:

<title>ソーシャル・ネットワーキングサイト [mixi(ミクシィ)]</title>

How do I find out my server encoding?
Thanks

[psalzmann]

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

[AutisticCuckoo]

That's not the server encoding; that's something that is used if the server doesn't send an encoding.

Browsers like Opera and Firefox can show you which encoding the server sends (although Firefox may just display the encoding it has chosen by default, but I think there's some extension or other that shows the real encoding).

You can usually control which encoding is sent by the server, either by changing its configuration or by using a server-side programming language to send the headers.