Apache change US-ASCII to UTF-8

English Applications
1

I have a website that I am trying to get an xml file to parse correctly to an email message. I need to have this xml file in UTF-8 encoding but it appears no matter what I try it still show up as US-ASCII. I am using the http://validator.w3.org to validate and this is the message I get.
Warning: text/* type without a charset parameter seen. Defaulting to US-ASCII per section 3.1 of RFC 3023.
http://site.site.com/file.xml
Fatal Error: Input data does not conform to the input encoding. The input encoding was us-ascii.
http://site.site.com/file.xml

I create an .htaccess file with this inside but that still doesn’t appear to help.’
AddDefaultCharset utf-8
IndexOptions +Charset=UTF-8
AddCharset utf-8 .html .xml

I have spent well over 4 hours trying to figure out what I need to do in order to get Apache to show this file as UTF-8 and not the ASCII format it appears to be using. What am I missing or what else do I need to do so this virtual host web directory or xml files are seen as UTF-8?

Thanks!

2

I run openSUSE 31.1, but naybe this helps.

As IMHO UTF-8 should bb the only charaset set used in all places, specialy my web site, I have:

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

as in fact the fisrst statements in my default-server.conf.

I also have in each page (might be superfluous):

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">

Also, when I use vi on my HTML files, vi reports:

:set                                                                                 
--- Opties ---
  filetype=html     nomodeline            showmatch           ttyfast
  helplang=nl         ruler               syntax=html         ttymouse=xterm2
  backspace=indent,eol,start
  fileencoding=utf-8
  fileencodings=ucs-bom,utf-8,default,latin1

Browsers report as their conclusion that the encoding is UTF-8.
So this seems to work here.

While this mainly is about the meta data about the file (which encoding it is in), please remind that a file containing only US-ASCII characters is as well a valid ASCII file as well as a valid UTF-8 file.

3

Thanks for this information. It has been ages since I’ve messed with Apache on this level but realized that my .htaccess file wasn’t being read since I had AllowOverride set to None. Silly me!. :sarcastic:

It is working now.