Hello Friends,

Greetings of the day!

How can i change my existing website in UTF-8, which is now in iso-8859-1 ????

And is it necessary for web sites to be in UTF-8 for South East Asian languages ????

I am quite afraid if so :(.

Revert awaited.


Thanks & Regards

Just add

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

as first thing after <head>.
As for South East Asian languages I'm not sure, but I think using utf-8 will do no harm. Al the characters of those languages are incorporated in utf-8.

Just add

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

as first thing after <head>.
As for South East Asian languages I'm not sure, but I think using utf-8 will do no harm. Al the characters of those languages are incorporated in utf-8.

1st of all Thanks for replying.

But it seems you didn't get me, what i said.

It's not my concern whether UTF-8 will harm or not.
But my concern is how i can change my entire website in UTF-8 ???

Just changing the meta tag will change the entire code ???

Because earlier this website was in English & designed in iso-8859-1.
But now my client wants it run in all regional languages. I have all the content in MS word.

So what i have to do now is just to copy & paste them to HTML pages ??? I had tried the same but when i looked those pages in browser font were looking too different & even not readable & impossible to understand.


Please suggest me in this regard.

Hope this time i'll be successful to make readre's understand. !!!


Thanks & Regards

Here you can find more info about meta tags: http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset. In short, the meta tag is read by the browsers and the browser will display the page in utf-8 (if your meta tag is to use utf-8).

If the whole site is already there, all you have to do is open each page in an editor that understands utf-8. After opening, just save it again as utf-8 encoded. Under windows you can even use notepad for this. (File, Save-as and under encoding choose utf-8).

If you only have the text in Ms-Word, you need to copy it to an utf-8 editor and save it from there as utf-8 encoded.

But the first thing you can try is using the meta tag, and see how the site looks like. With any luck, that's all you have to change.

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As well as this, you should place text direction and language attributes into your html tag, e.g.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="rtl" lang="ar-sa" xml:lang="ar-sa">

For Saudi Arabian Arabic. RTL means right-to-left. If dir is left out, it defaults to left-to-right.
You can also include the language meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="ar-sa"/>

If you site is multilingual, you should place these 3 attributes in the containing tags, e.g.

<div dir="rtl" lang="ar-sa" xml:lang="ar-sa">
 <p>مرحبا العالم</p>
</div>
<div dir="ltr" lang="en-gb" xml:lang="en-gb">
 <p>Hello World</p>
</div>
<div dir="ltr" lang="hi" xml:lang="hi">
 <p>नमस्ते दुनिया</p>
</div>

This is really useful as you can style different languages:

<style type="text/css">
[lang|=en]
{
color:green;
}
[lang|=hi]
{
color:blue;
}
[lang|=ar]
{
color:red;
}
</style>

The "|=" ensures that all country-specific languages are included (e.g. |=en , will apply to en-us, en, en-gb, en-au etc)

Thanks a lot for all the replies.

I am extremely Sorry as i didn't close it. In future i'll take care of it.

Thanks & Regards

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