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Complete info on fixing embedded encodings. Will discuss UTF-8 next.

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git-svn-id: http://htmlpurifier.org/svnroot/htmlpurifier/trunk@638 48356398-32a2-884e-a903-53898d9a118a
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Edward Z. Yang 2007-01-14 02:31:54 +00:00
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docs/enduser-utf8.html
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@ -5,12 +5,17 @@
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="description" content="Describes the rationale for using UTF-8, the ramifications otherwise, and how to make the switch." /> <meta name="description" content="Describes the rationale for using UTF-8, the ramifications otherwise, and how to make the switch." />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./style.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./style.css" />
<script defer="defer" type="text/javascript" src="./toc-gen.js"></script>
<style type="text/css"> <style type="text/css">
.minor td {font-style:italic;} .minor td {font-style:italic;}
</style> </style>
<title>UTF-8 - HTML Purifier</title> <title>UTF-8 - HTML Purifier</title>
<!-- Note to users: this document, though professing to be UTF-8, attempts
to use only ASCII characters, because most webservers are configured
to send HTML as ISO-8859-1 -->
</head><body> </head><body>
<h1>UTF-8</h1> <h1>UTF-8</h1>
@ -24,19 +29,24 @@ to be caught by surprise by some of HTML Purifier's behavior, namely
the fact that it operates UTF-8 or the limitations of the character the fact that it operates UTF-8 or the limitations of the character
encoding transformations it does. This document will walk you through encoding transformations it does. This document will walk you through
determining the encoding of your system and how you should handle determining the encoding of your system and how you should handle
this information.</p> this information. It will stay away from excessive discussion on
the internals of character encoding, but offer the information in
asides that can easily be skipped.</p>
<blockquote class="aside">Text in this formatting is an <strong>aside</strong>, <blockquote class="aside">
<div class="label">Asides</div>
<p>Text in this formatting is an <strong>aside</strong>,
interesting tidbits for the curious but not strictly necessary material to interesting tidbits for the curious but not strictly necessary material to
do the tutorial. If you read this text, you'll come out do the tutorial. If you read this text, you'll come out
with a greater understanding of the underlying issues.</blockquote> with a greater understanding of the underlying issues.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Finding the real encoding</h2> <h2 id="findcharset">Finding the real encoding</h2>
<p>In the beginning, there was ASCII, and things were simple. But they <p>In the beginning, there was ASCII, and things were simple. But they
weren't good, for no one could write in Cryllic or Thai. So there weren't good, for no one could write in Cryllic or Thai. So there
exploded a proliferation of character encodings to remedy the problem exploded a proliferation of character encodings to remedy the problem
by extending the characters ASCII could express. This is ridiculously by extending the characters ASCII could express. This ridiculously
simplified version of the history of character encodings shows us that simplified version of the history of character encodings shows us that
there are now many character encodings floating around.</p> there are now many character encodings floating around.</p>
@ -85,8 +95,8 @@ Some common ones:</p>
<th>IE's Description</th> <th>IE's Description</th>
<th>Mime Name</th> <th>Mime Name</th>
</tr></thead> </tr></thead>
<tr><th colspan="2">Windows</th></td>
<tbody> <tbody>
<tr><th colspan="2">Windows</th></tr>
<tr><td>Arabic (Windows)</td><td>Windows-1256</td></tr> <tr><td>Arabic (Windows)</td><td>Windows-1256</td></tr>
<tr><td>Baltic (Windows)</td><td>Windows-1257</td></tr> <tr><td>Baltic (Windows)</td><td>Windows-1257</td></tr>
<tr><td>Central European (Windows)</td><td>Windows-1250</td></tr> <tr><td>Central European (Windows)</td><td>Windows-1250</td></tr>
@ -98,22 +108,22 @@ Some common ones:</p>
<tr><td>Vietnamese (Windows)</td><td>Windows-1258</td></tr> <tr><td>Vietnamese (Windows)</td><td>Windows-1258</td></tr>
<tr><td>Western European (Windows)</td><td>Windows-1252</td></tr> <tr><td>Western European (Windows)</td><td>Windows-1252</td></tr>
</tbody> </tbody>
<tr><th colspan="2">ISO</th></td>
<tbody> <tbody>
<tr><td>Arabic (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-6</td><td> <tr><th colspan="2">ISO</th></tr>
<tr><td>Baltic (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-4</td><td> <tr><td>Arabic (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-6</td></tr>
<tr><td>Central European (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-2</td><td> <tr><td>Baltic (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-4</td></tr>
<tr><td>Cyrillic (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-5</td><td> <tr><td>Central European (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-2</td></tr>
<tr class="minor"><td>Estonian (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-13</td><td> <tr><td>Cyrillic (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-5</td></tr>
<tr class="minor"><td>Greek (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-7</td><td> <tr class="minor"><td>Estonian (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-13</td></tr>
<tr><td>Hebrew (ISO-Logical)</td><td>ISO-8859-8-l</td><td> <tr class="minor"><td>Greek (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-7</td></tr>
<tr><td>Hebrew (ISO-Visual)</td><td>ISO-8859-8</td><td> <tr><td>Hebrew (ISO-Logical)</td><td>ISO-8859-8-l</td></tr>
<tr class="minor"><td>Latin 9 (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-15</td><td> <tr><td>Hebrew (ISO-Visual)</td><td>ISO-8859-8</td></tr>
<tr class="minor"><td>Turkish (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-9</td><td> <tr class="minor"><td>Latin 9 (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-15</td></tr>
<tr><td>Western European (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-1</td><td> <tr class="minor"><td>Turkish (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-9</td></tr>
</tbody> <tr><td>Western European (ISO)</td><td>ISO-8859-1</td></tr>
<tr><th colspan="2">Other</th></td>
</tbody> </tbody>
<tbody>
<tr><th colspan="2">Other</th></tr>
<tr><td>Chinese Simplified (GB18030)</td><td>GB18030</td></tr> <tr><td>Chinese Simplified (GB18030)</td><td>GB18030</td></tr>
<tr><td>Chinese Simplified (GB2312)</td><td>GB2312</td></tr> <tr><td>Chinese Simplified (GB2312)</td><td>GB2312</td></tr>
<tr><td>Chinese Simplified (HZ)</td><td>HZ</td></tr> <tr><td>Chinese Simplified (HZ)</td><td>HZ</td></tr>
@ -130,7 +140,7 @@ character encodings, and having to lookup the real names with a table
is a pain, so I recommend using Mozilla Firefox to find out your is a pain, so I recommend using Mozilla Firefox to find out your
character encoding.</p> character encoding.</p>
<h2>Finding the embedded encoding</h2> <h2 id="findmetacharset">Finding the embedded encoding</h2>
<p>At this point, you may be asking, &quot;Didn't we already find out our <p>At this point, you may be asking, &quot;Didn't we already find out our
encoding?&quot; Well, as it turns out, there are multiple places where encoding?&quot; Well, as it turns out, there are multiple places where
@ -152,12 +162,12 @@ if your <code>META</code> tag claims that either:</p>
<li>There is no <code>META</code> tag at all! (horror, horror!)</li> <li>There is no <code>META</code> tag at all! (horror, horror!)</li>
</ol> </ol>
<h2>Fixing the embedded encoding</h2> <h2 id="fixcharset">Fixing the encoding</h2>
<p>If your <code>META</code> encoding and your real encoding match, <p>If your <code>META</code> encoding and your real encoding match,
savvy! You can skip this section. If they don't...</p> savvy! You can skip this section. If they don't...</p>
<h3>I have no embedded encoding!</h3> <h3 id="fixcharset-none">No embedded encoding</h3>
<p>If this is the case, you'll want to add in the appropriate <p>If this is the case, you'll want to add in the appropriate
<code>META</code> tag to your website. It's as simple as copy-pasting <code>META</code> tag to your website. It's as simple as copy-pasting
@ -175,12 +185,242 @@ of your real encoding.</p>
exploit</a>.</p> exploit</a>.</p>
<p>You might be able to get away with not specifying a character <p>You might be able to get away with not specifying a character
encoding with the <code>META</code> tag as long as your webserver encoding with the <code>META</code> tag as long as your webserver
sends the right Content-Type header, but why risk it?</p> sends the right Content-Type header, but why risk it? Besides, if
the user downloads the HTML file, there is no longer any webserver
to define the character encoding.</p>
</blockquote> </blockquote>
<h3>Huh? The embedded encoding disagrees!</h3> <h3 id="fixcharset-diff">Embedded encoding disagrees</h3>
<h2>Further Reading</h2> <p>This is an extremely common mistake: another source is telling
the browser what the
character encoding is and is overriding the embedded encoding. This
source usually is the Content-Type HTTP header that the webserver (i.e.
Apache) sends. A usual Content-Type header sent with a page might
look like this:</p>
<pre>Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1</pre>
<p>Notice how there is a charset parameter: this is the webserver's
way of telling a browser what the character encoding is, much like
the <code>META</code> tags we touched upon previously.</p>
<blockquote class="aside"><p>In fact, the <code>META</code> tag is
designed as a substitute for the HTTP header for contexts where
sending headers is impossible (such as locally stored files without
a webserver). Thus the name <code>http-equiv</code> (HTTP equivalent).
</p></blockquote>
<p>There are two ways to go about fixing this: changing the <code>META</code>
tag to match the HTTP header, or changing the HTTP header to match
the <code>META</code> tag. How do we know which to do? It depends
on the website's content: after all, headers and tags are only ways of
describing the actual characters on the web page.</p>
<p>If your website:</p>
<dl>
<dt>...only uses ASCII characters,</dt>
<dd>Either way is fine, but I recommend switching both to
UTF-8 (more on this later).</dd>
<dt>...uses special characters, and they display
properly,</dt>
<dd>Change the embedded encoding to the server encoding.</dd>
<dt>...uses special characters, but users often complain that
they come out garbled,</dt>
<dd>Change the server encoding to the embedded encoding.</dd>
</dl>
<p>Changing a META tag is easy: just swap out the old encoding
for the new. Changing the server (HTTP header) encoding, however,
is slightly more difficult.</p>
<h3 id="fixcharset-server">Changing the server encoding</h3>
<h4 id="fixcharset-server-php">PHP header() function</h4>
<p>The simplest way to handle this problem is to send the encoding
yourself, via your programming language. Since you're using HTML
Purifier, I'll assume PHP, although it's not too difficult to do
similar things in
<a href="http://www.w3.org/International/O-HTTP-charset#scripting">other
languages</a>. The appropriate code is:</p>
<pre><a href="http://php.net/header">header</a>('Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8');</pre>
<p>...replacing UTF-8 with whatever your embedded encoding is.
This code must come before any output, so be careful about
stray whitespace in your application.</p>
<h4 id="fixcharset-server-nophp">Non-PHP</h4>
<p>You may, for whatever reason, may need to set the character encoding
on non-PHP files, usually plain ol' HTML files. Doing this
is more of a hit-or-miss process: depending on the software being
used as a webserver and the configuration of that software, certain
techniques may work, or may not work.</p>
<h4 id="fixcharset-server-htaccess">.htaccess</h4>
<p>On Apache, you can use an .htaccess file to change the character
encoding. I'll defer to
<a href="http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-htaccess-charset">W3C</a>
for the in-depth explanation, but it boils down to creating a file
named .htaccess with the contents:</p>
<pre><a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_mime.html#addcharset">AddCharset</a> UTF-8 .html</pre>
<p>Where UTF-8 is replaced with the character encoding you want to
use and .html is a file extension that this will be applied to. This
character encoding will then be set for any file directly in
or in the subdirectories of directory you place this file in.</p>
<p>If you're feeling particularly courageous, you can use:</p>
<pre><a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/core.html#adddefaultcharset">AddDefaultCharset</a> UTF-8</pre>
<p>...which changes the character set Apache adds to any document that
doesn't have any Content-Type parameters. This directive, which the
default configuration file sets to iso-8859-1 for security
reasons, is probably why your headers mismatch
with the <code>META</code> tag. If you would prefer Apache not to be
butting in on your character encodings, you can tell it not
to send anything at all:</p>
<pre><a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/core.html#adddefaultcharset">AddDefaultCharset</a> Off</pre>
<p>...making your <code>META</code> tags the sole source of
character encoding information. In these cases, it is
<em>especially</em> important to make sure you have valid <code>META</code>
tags on your pages and all the text before them is ASCII.</p>
<blockquote class="aside"><p>These directives can also be
placed in httpd.conf file for Apache, but
in most shared hosting situations you won't be able to edit this file.
</p></blockquote>
<h4 id="fixcharset-server-ext">File extensions</h4>
<p>If you're not allowed to use .htaccess files, you can often
piggy-back off of Apache's default AddCharset declarations to get
your files in the proper extension. Here are Apache's default
character set declarations:</p>
<table class="table">
<thead><tr>
<th>Charset</th>
<th>File extension(s)</th>
</tr></thead>
<tbody>
<tr><td>ISO-8859-1</td><td>.iso8859-1 .latin1</td></tr>
<tr><td>ISO-8859-2</td><td>.iso8859-2 .latin2 .cen</td></tr>
<tr><td>ISO-8859-3</td><td>.iso8859-3 .latin3</td></tr>
<tr><td>ISO-8859-4</td><td>.iso8859-4 .latin4</td></tr>
<tr><td>ISO-8859-5</td><td>.iso8859-5 .latin5 .cyr .iso-ru</td></tr>
<tr><td>ISO-8859-6</td><td>.iso8859-6 .latin6 .arb</td></tr>
<tr><td>ISO-8859-7</td><td>.iso8859-7 .latin7 .grk</td></tr>
<tr><td>ISO-8859-8</td><td>.iso8859-8 .latin8 .heb</td></tr>
<tr><td>ISO-8859-9</td><td>.iso8859-9 .latin9 .trk</td></tr>
<tr><td>ISO-2022-JP</td><td>.iso2022-jp .jis</td></tr>
<tr><td>ISO-2022-KR</td><td>.iso2022-kr .kis</td></tr>
<tr><td>ISO-2022-CN</td><td>.iso2022-cn .cis</td></tr>
<tr><td>Big5</td><td>.Big5 .big5 .b5</td></tr>
<tr><td>WINDOWS-1251</td><td>.cp-1251 .win-1251</td></tr>
<tr><td>CP866</td><td>.cp866</td></tr>
<tr><td>KOI8-r</td><td>.koi8-r .koi8-ru</td></tr>
<tr><td>KOI8-ru</td><td>.koi8-uk .ua</td></tr>
<tr><td>ISO-10646-UCS-2</td><td>.ucs2</td></tr>
<tr><td>ISO-10646-UCS-4</td><td>.ucs4</td></tr>
<tr><td>UTF-8</td><td>.utf8</td></tr>
<tr><td>GB2312</td><td>.gb2312 .gb </td></tr>
<tr><td>utf-7</td><td>.utf7</td></tr>
<tr><td>EUC-TW</td><td>.euc-tw</td></tr>
<tr><td>EUC-JP</td><td>.euc-jp</td></tr>
<tr><td>EUC-KR</td><td>.euc-kr</td></tr>
<tr><td>shift_jis</td><td>.sjis</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>So, for example, a file named <code>page.utf8.html</code> or
<code>page.html.utf8</code> will probably be sent with the UTF-8 charset
attached, the difference being that if there is an
<code>AddCharset charset .html</code> declaration, it will override
the .utf8 extension in <code>page.utf8.html</code> (precedence moves
from right to left). By default, Apache has no such declaration.</p>
<h4 id="fixcharset-server-iis">Microsoft IIS</h4>
<p>If anyone can contribute information on how to configure Microsoft
IIS to change character encodings, I'd be grateful.</p>
<h3 id="fixcharset-xml">XML</h3>
<p><code>META</code> tags are the most common source of embedded
encodings, but they can also come from somewhere else: XML
processing instructions. They look like:</p>
<pre>&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;UTF-8&quot;?&gt;</pre>
<p>...and are most often found in XML documents (including XHTML).</p>
<p>For XHTML, this processing instruction theoretically
overrides the <code>META</code> tag. In reality, this happens only when the
XHTML is actually served as legit XML and not HTML, which is almost
always never due to Internet Explorer's lack of support for
<code>application/xhtml+xml</code> (even though doing so is often
argued to be <a href="http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml">good practice</a>).</p>
<p>For XML, however, this processing instruction is extremely important.
Since most webservers are not configured to send charsets for .xml files,
this is the only thing a parser has to go on. Furthermore, the default
for XML files is UTF-8, which often butts heads with more common
ISO-8859-1 encoding (you see this in garbled RSS feeds).</p>
<p>In short, if you use XHTML and have gone through the
trouble of adding the XML header, be sure to make sure it jives
with your <code>META</code> tags and HTTP headers.</p>
<h3>Inside the process</h3>
<p>This section is not required reading,
but may answer some of your questions on what's going on in all
this character encoding hocus pocus. If you're interested in
moving on to the next phase, skip this section.</p>
<p>A logical question that follows all of our wheeling and dealing
with multiple sources of character encodings is &quot;Why are there
so many options?&quot; To answer this question, we have to turn
back our definition of character encodings: they allow a program
to interpret bytes into human-readable characters.</p>
<p>Thus, a chicken-egg problem: a character encoding
is necessary to interpret the
text of a document. A <code>META</code> tag is in the text of a document.
The <code>META</code> tag gives the character encoding. How can we
determine the contents of a <code>META</code> tag, inside the text,
if we don't know it's character encoding? And how do we figure out
the character encoding, if we don't know the contents of the
<code>META</code> tag?</p>
<p>Fortunantely for us, the characters we need to write the
<code>META</code> are in ASCII, which is pretty much universal
over every character encoding that is in common use today. So,
all the web-browser has to do is parse all the way down until
it gets to the Content-Type tag, extract the character encoding
tag, then re-parse the document according to this new information.</p>
<p>Obviously this is complicated, so browsers prefer the simpler
and more efficient solution: get the character encoding from a
somewhere other than the document itself, i.e. the HTTP headers,
much to the chagrin of HTML authors who can't set these headers.</p>
<h2 id="whyutf8">Why UTF-8?</h2>
<p>So, you've gone through all the trouble of ensuring that...</p>
<blockquote class="aside"><p>Needs completion!</p></blockquote>
<h2 id="externallinks">Further Reading</h2>
<p>Many other developers have already discussed the subject of Unicode, <p>Many other developers have already discussed the subject of Unicode,
UTF-8 and internationalization, and I would like to defer to them for UTF-8 and internationalization, and I would like to defer to them for

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@ -23,6 +23,8 @@ h4 {font-family:sans-serif; font-size:0.9em; font-weight:bold; }
/* Marks off asides, discussions on why something is the way it is */ /* Marks off asides, discussions on why something is the way it is */
.aside {margin-left:2em; font-family:sans-serif; font-size:0.9em; } .aside {margin-left:2em; font-family:sans-serif; font-size:0.9em; }
blockquote .label {font-weight:bold; font-size:1em; margin:0 0 .1em;
border-bottom:1px solid #CCC;}
/* A regular table */ /* A regular table */
.table {border-collapse:collapse; border-bottom:2px solid #888; margin-left:2em; } .table {border-collapse:collapse; border-bottom:2px solid #888; margin-left:2em; }
@ -37,4 +39,4 @@ h4 {font-family:sans-serif; font-size:0.9em; font-weight:bold; }
#index {font-size:smaller; } #index {font-size:smaller; }
/* Contains, without exception, $Id$, for SVN version info. */ /* Contains, without exception, $Id$, for SVN version info. */
#version {text-align:right; font-style:italic; margin:2em 0;} #version {text-align:right; font-style:italic; margin:2em 0;}