Inserting Chinese Meta Tags

Question

I have a multilingual site and I am having a problem inserting Chinese meta tags. These are transformed into question marks.

Is there a way how I can achieve this?

Many thanks

--EDIT--

The table storing the SEF Urls is in the latin1_swedish_ci character set. How can I change this single table to utf8_general_ci without breaking the URLs?

Many thanks!

Answer 1

Make sure that:

• The character encoding you are using includes those characters (UTF-8 is safe)
• Your editor is configured to use that character encoding
• Your database (if these details are stored in one) is configured to use that encoding
• Your webserver is configured to output a charset parameter on the Content-type header (and it uses the correct encoding)
• Your browser is not configured to ignore the specified encoding

Answer 2

Use numeric character references.

EDIT

wiki numeric character references

Convert Chinese characters to Unicode

Answer 3

Are you retrieving the data from a database? If so ensure that you connection character set is also set to utf-8. In MySQL for example you would need to issue this query before any other:

SET NAMES 'utf8';

Answer 4

It could be that you need to encode the Chinese characters to HTML entities, or specify a character set.

Answer 5

Have you checked your character set in your document headers? I usually use UTF-8 to achieve chinese character sets.

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

If you're using a program like dreamweaver, make sure your files are actually being SAVED in the correct character set as well. We had a problem where characters in a dreamweaver file were coming through as ???? because the editor itself was set to iso-8859-1

Answer 6

Maybe your Browser - or more exactly, the font you selected to display the page - doesn't support chinese characters. What system and browser is this on?