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Character Encoding Problem - Browser Cannot Auto-Detect Arabic Pages

Tamer Al-Khouli is facing a strange character encoding problem with Firefox 2 and IE 6.0 browser.

Both the web browsers are unable to detect local language webpages (Arabic in his case) and display junk unrecognizable characters instead.

Since the character set cannot be detected automatically, Tamer has to manually select the correct character encoding each time he visits a webpage written in Arabic. He further writes:
If I followed a link from that page to another Arabic page, I need to repeat the process and so on ! I tried to solve this by going to Advanced-General-languages in Firefox , and set the Arabic language to the top of of preferrable languages list , but this didn't work.

I tried setting the encoding in IE as Arabic ( not "Auto select" ) .. but this also didn't work .
Tamer, most likely the problem is not at your end but with the webpages that you are visiting. The site developers may have failed to include the correct character encoding information in the meta tags of the webpages [check the following line in the HTML source of the sites you visit]
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
Coming to the solution, since auto-detect is not working for you, try setting the browser to use Unicode ( UTF-8 ) encoding which is a form of universal character encoding and should display most characters.

If even that fails, set the character encoding as Universal in Firefox as the last resort. (see screenshot)

The above fixes may or may not work - the real solution would be to drop an email to the owners of your favorite websites an ask them to specify the character encoding information in their webpages.

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