Web Form: Other Question: British pound sign - U+00A3

[Magda Danish (Unicode)]

Jim,

I am forwarding your email to the Unicode list http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist.html for possible answers from the list subscribers.

Regards,

Magda Danish
Administrative Director
The Unicode Consortium
650-693-3921


> -----Original Message-----
> Date/Time: Wed Oct 1 05:19:00 EDT 2003
> Contact: ***@admin.ox.ac.uk
> Report Type: Other Question, Problem, or Feedback
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm a web developer at Oxford University in the UK, and we
> are considering encoding all our websites in Unicode to allow
> support of non-western languages.
>
> However, we have a problem.
>
>[...]
>
> Our problem is the representation of the £ sign (British
> pound sign - U+00A3). When we type this character into our
> pages and then set the character encoding in our pages to
> Unicode (UTF-8) (either by setting it directly in the HTTP
> header, or setting it using the <meta
> http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
> tag), when we view the pages we see the standard ASCII set of
> characters, but the Pound sign displays as an error.
>
> This happens when we use Netscape 7.02, and IE 6.0 (both very
> modern browsers.
>
> Is there something obvious that I am missing? If there is
> then I would very much appreciate it if you explain it in as
> simple terms as possible as I am a real novice in this area.
>
> Also which version of Unicode does HTML 4.0 support using
> escape characters (eg. &#163)?
>
> With this problem with our pages we are seriously considering
> abandoning Unicode for ISO-8859-1.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Jim Leek
>
> -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
> (End of Report)
>
>
>


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[Asmus Freytag]

At 10:50 AM 10/1/03 -0700, Magda Danish \(Unicode\) wrote:
> Our problem is the representation of the £ sign (British
> > pound sign - U+00A3). When we type this character into our
> > pages and then set the character encoding in our pages to
> > Unicode (UTF-8) (either by setting it directly in the HTTP
> > header, or setting it using the <meta
> > http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
> > tag), when we view the pages we see the standard ASCII set of
> > characters, but the Pound sign displays as an error.

Have you tried validating your pages via http://validator.w3.org ?

That would tell you whether it's an issue with what's in your file or
with how the browser gets to see it.

Also, is this limited to the pound sign, or do you also have issues with
the copyright sign, for example?

A./


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[Marco Cimarosti]

***@admin.ox.ac.uk wrote (through Magda Danish):
[...]
> > Our problem is the representation of the £ sign (British
> > pound sign - U+00A3). When we type this character into our
> > pages and then set the character encoding in our pages to
> > Unicode (UTF-8) (either by setting it directly in the HTTP
> > header, or setting it using the <meta
> > http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

I think it should be "charset=UTF-8", in capital letters. I was looking into
the IANA charsets today, and I don't remember having seen a lowercase alias
for that.

> > tag), when we view the pages we see the standard ASCII set of
> > characters, but the Pound sign displays as an error.

The most obvious question is: are your pages *actually* in UTF-8? It is not
enough that you *declare* that they are UTF-8 if you didn't actually save
them as UTF-8 with your editor.

Could you put on line a small test page containing the pound symbol and post
the URL?

> > Also which version of Unicode does HTML 4.0 support using
> > escape characters (eg. &#163)?

It doesn't matter which version of Unicode it is, because the pound symbol
is in from day zero.

Notice however that HTML character reference must end with a semicolon:

&#163;

_ Marco


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[Stefan Persson]

Marco Cimarosti wrote:

>I think it should be "charset=UTF-8", in capital letters. I was looking into
>the IANA charsets today, and I don't remember having seen a lowercase alias
>for that.
>
>
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc1945/rfc1945 tells:

> "literal"
>
> Quotation marks surround literal text. Unless stated otherwise,
> the text is case-insensitive.

Stefan




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[John Delacour]

At 8:40 pm +0200 1/10/03, Marco Cimarosti wrote:

> > > http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
>
>I think it should be "charset=UTF-8", in capital letters. I was looking into
>the IANA charsets today, and I don't remember having seen a lowercase alias
>for that.

It is the whole content value of the meta tag
that needs to be quoted and case is not important.

There are five ways I can think of to represent
the pound sign, the simplest being &pound;

Although the doc type and charset declarations
are required, all but the two-byte utf-8
repesentation of the character will display
correctly even if utf-8 is not specified.


<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Wilbur/HTML32.dtd">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>Pound</title>
</head>
<ul>
<li>Smith &#163;1,000
<li>Jones &#xa3;2,000
<li>Allen &pound;3,000
<li>King &#x00a3;4,000
<li>Haig £5,000
</ul>





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[Pim Blokland]

Magda Danish (Unicode) schreef:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > Date/Time: Wed Oct 1 05:19:00 EDT 2003
> > Contact: ***@admin.ox.ac.uk
> > Report Type: Other Question, Problem, or Feedback
> > (..)
> > the Pound sign displays as an error.
> > This happens when we use Netscape 7.02, and IE 6.0 (both very
> > modern browsers.
> >
> > Is there something obvious that I am missing?

Probably, yes. However, I have no idea what it could be.
This sounds like a HTML question rather than a Unicode question.
Anyway, if the Pound sign is coded as &#163; it really does not
matter if you identify the character set as ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8 or
anything else (any superset of ASCII7 that is); it displays
correctly.

> > Also which version of Unicode does HTML 4.0 support using
> > escape characters (eg. &#163)?

Unicode doesn't "do" HTML support; maybe this question was meant the
other way round? ("which version of HTML does Unicode support?")

Pim Blokland



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[Peter Kirk]

>>-----Original Message-----
>>Date/Time: Wed Oct 1 05:19:00 EDT 2003
>>Contact: ***@admin.ox.ac.uk
>>Report Type: Other Question, Problem, or Feedback
>>
>>Hi,
>>
>>I'm a web developer at Oxford University in the UK, and we
>>are considering encoding all our websites in Unicode to allow
>>support of non-western languages.
>>
>>However, we have a problem.
>>
>>[...]
>>
>>Our problem is the representation of the £ sign (British
>>pound sign - U+00A3). When we type this character into our
>>pages and then set the character encoding in our pages to
>>Unicode (UTF-8) (either by setting it directly in the HTTP
>>header, or setting it using the <meta
>>http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
>>tag), when we view the pages we see the standard ASCII set of
>>characters, but the Pound sign displays as an error.
>>
>>...
>>
>
>
Jim, I hope this doesn't sound too obvious, but you could have missed
it: In your UTF-8 encoded file, do you have a single byte 0xA3 or 163?
It sounds like this is what you are doing if you first type in the pound
sign then declare the encoding to be UTF-8. But 0xA3 alone is invalid
UTF-8, so this would explain the error. The pound sign needs to be
encoded as two bytes according to the UTF-8 definition, which would be
0xC2 0xA3 - or as "&#163;" as Marco says.

--
Peter Kirk
***@qaya.org (personal)
***@qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/




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[Marco Cimarosti]

> This (Peter's) answer is, in my understanding, the nearest to the
> truth.

He made the same assumption I did: you declared that your file was UTF-8 but
actually it wasn't. :-)

> Here is the problem:
>
> How do I make my keyboard which only produces 8-bit [...]

The keyboard has nothing to do with it. The problem is how you save the
file.

You should see if the "Save as..." command of your text editor (or HTML
authoring tool) has an option like "Save as UTF-8".

If it doesn't, see if your Notepad utility has it option. If it's there (I
don't remember in which version of Windows it was added). You just open your
file and save it selecting "Save as UTF-8".

You can also use an utility to convert the character set. E.g., try the
"iconv.exe" utility from libiconv
(http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=23617).

Ciao.
Marco


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