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javascriptunicodeinternationalizationcharacter-encoding

international characters in Javascript

I am working on a web application, where I transfer data from the server to the browser in XML.

Since I'm danish, I quickly run into problems with the characters æøå.

I know that in html, I use the "æøå" for æøå.

however, as soon as the chars pass through JavaScript, I get black boxes with "?" in them when using æøå, and "æøå" is printed as is.

I've made sure to set it to utf-8, but that isn't helping much.

Ideally, I want it to work with any special characters (naturally).

The example that isn't working is included below:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <title>Untitled Document</title>
        <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
            alert("&aelig;&oslash;&aring;");
            alert("æøå");

        </script>
    </head>
    <body>
    </body>
</html>

What am I doing wrong?

Ok, thanks to Grapefrukts answer, I got it working.

I actually needed it for data coming from an MySQL server. Since the saving of the files in UTF-8 encoding only solves the problem for static content, I figure I'd include the solution for strings from a MySQL server, pulled out using PHP:

utf8_encode($MyStringHere)

Solution

  • Just specifying UTF-8 in the header is not enough. I'd bet you haven't saved your file as UTF-8. Any reasonably advanced text editor will have this option. Try that and I'm sure it'll work!