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Where is the option “Unicode” in “Character Encoding for Legacy Content”?

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In “Character Encoding for Legacy Content” (cf. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/settings-fonts-languages-and-pop-ups) there is no option to select “Unicode (UTF-8)” for pages that do not specify a default encoding.

Even though my setting is set to “default value for the current language”, I have no clue what this default value is and where to set it. For the record, my LANG environment variable is set to “fr_FR.UTF-8”. Maybe it refers to “Languages” in the same dialog, but this option does not offer the possibility to choose the caracter encoding and is set to “en-us“.

In the end, I have pages displayed with some kind of ISO-8859-* when they are in UTF-8. Adding a html meta tag or altering the HTTP headers is not an option for me.

In “Character Encoding for Legacy Content” (cf. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/settings-fonts-languages-and-pop-ups) there is no option to select “Unicode (UTF-8)” for pages that do not specify a default encoding. Even though my setting is set to “default value for the current language”, I have no clue what this default value is and where to set it. For the record, my LANG environment variable is set to “fr_FR.UTF-8”. Maybe it refers to “Languages” in the same dialog, but this option does not offer the possibility to choose the caracter encoding and is set to “en-us“. In the end, I have pages displayed with some kind of ISO-8859-* when they are in UTF-8. Adding a html meta tag or altering the HTTP headers is not an option for me.

All Replies (5)

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Legacy Content is about 8 bit Windows and Western encoding and Unicode is not part of this. Unicode is used when the server sends this encoding or you can select it via View > Character Encoding if the wrong choice is made.

Did you check how the server is sending the pages that are shown as a Western (ISO-8859) encoding?

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The protocol used to access the files is not HTTP but “file:” (i.e. they are local files). The Firefox page information says it's windows-1252 encoded, but I don't know how this could be infered in a linux system using UTF-8 everywhere. How can I check that my system is sending this information (if it does)?

(The “file” comand output for the documents is “HTML document, UTF-8 Unicode text, with very long lines”, mime type is “text/html” and mime encoding “utf-8”.)

I know I can use the new button “Character Encoding” to change encoding, but I SHOULD NOT have to do it for every file. That it is a real pain in the ass is not even relevent.

If ”legacy content” is not the setting I am looking for, what is the setting to set a default encoding when none is specified?

I am not sure this will help, but Chromium and Lynx are displaying correctly the files.

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Modified by Aleksej

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Thanks for pointing me to this bug report. Somehow I managed not to find it.

Too bad there is no workaround in the comments. I guess I'll change my default browser for local files.

Modified by YetAnotherUsername