CentOS (RHEL) apache encoding

Hi folks,
somewhat of a new boy to this webserver lark but..

In a new installation of CentOS
(httpd-2.0.52-28.ent.centos4), the default encoding in
httpd.conf is
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

We are a small UK based hosting company, customers are
having problems
with odd character being displayed on their websites
whenever they use
the UK pound sterling sign £ and a few others.

A colleage changed the httpd.conf line to
AddDefaultCharset BS_4730

This solved the immediate problem but caused some W3C
validation problems and broke an XMLHttpRequest() issue in
explorer with some sites.

I changed the value to
AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1
This solved the UK pound sign problem and the W3C validation
problem (unless the customer's web page specifically stated
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> Then it broke
validation AND odd character issues)

As you can guess, we are fumbling around in the dark here.

If it helps..... pstree on the local vc looks fine, but from
a windows machine using an ssh client the line drawing
characters are a mess. I have tried pstree -U and pstree -G,
they just cause a different mess.

I would love to think that the problems are related and one
simple locale option - or similar - will solve all of these
, but I'm out of ideas.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers
Andy

Andy napisał(a):
> Hi folks,
> somewhat of a new boy to this webserver lark but..
>
> In a new installation of CentOS (httpd-2.0.52-28.ent.centos4), the
> default encoding in httpd.conf is
> AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
>
> We are a small UK based hosting company, customers are having problems
> with odd character being displayed on their websites whenever they use
> the UK pound sterling sign £ and a few others.
>
> A colleage changed the httpd.conf line to
> AddDefaultCharset BS_4730
>
> This solved the immediate problem but caused some W3C validation
> problems and broke an XMLHttpRequest() issue in explorer with some sites.
>
> I changed the value to
> AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1
> This solved the UK pound sign problem and the W3C validation problem
> (unless the customer's web page specifically stated <?xml version="1.0"
> encoding="UTF-8"?> Then it broke validation AND odd character issues)
>
> As you can guess, we are fumbling around in the dark here.
>
> If it helps..... pstree on the local vc looks fine, but from a windows
> machine using an ssh client the line drawing characters are a mess. I
> have tried pstree -U and pstree -G, they just cause a different mess.
>
> I would love to think that the problems are related and one simple
> locale option - or similar - will solve all of these , but I'm out of
> ideas.
>

You should set
AddDefaultCharset Off
then Apache won't enforce necoding and then browsers will read encoding
from xml header or from meta in xhtml/html.



--
greetings
Sebastian