Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 10/15/07 04:50

Scripsit still me:

> I am working with a simple Paypal shopping cart and having an issue
> with an odd character.

Since you don't include a URL, you're effectively asking for a lump of
guesses.

> In the case of the call from the CGI program, I see a few
> funky  characters displayed on screen.

You have some error in your code.

> The code that is causing them
> is easy to find in the source:
>
> <tr class="summary">
> <td>Â </td>
> <td>Â </td>

Excellent! Now remove those funky characters! Problem solved.

> Here's the strange part: the exact same characters appear in the
> source that returns from the regular FORM/SUBMIT, yet the characters
> don't appear in either browser with the FORM/POST.

Sounds like character encoding confusion. Anything that _looks_ like "Â " is
probably something UTF-8 encoded (or distorted UTF-8) interpreted by some
8-bit encoding.

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

Now that might be relevant, but is this really the case? Which encoding do
browsers actually use in interpreting the data?

That is, why don't you include some URLs so that the actual HTTP headers as
well as page content can be analyzed?

> Any thoughts? Is this a character set issue? I could change the header
> before I issue the page from the CGI of there is a character set that
> would work better.

If you are thinking about "trying" different charset parameters, you surely
have an issue with character sets. What is the _actual_ encoding of the
pages? That is, the encoding of the data itself, as opposite to what headers
or meta tags say about it.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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