Arabic characters corrupt on landing, fine after refresh - UTF8

Question

I have an php page with mixed Latin and Arabic characters. The charset declaration tag is in the html code

and the file is saved as UTF-8. All the text is static and in the php file (does not come from a DB or an external source)

When I browse to the site some pages randomly get corrupt in IE and FF and display all question marks. After I refresh the page, text is displayed properly though... I have been working with Arabic and Hebrew for a long time and this is the first time I run in to this issue. Can anybody think of a cause?

Chrome is always fine...

Answer 1

Turns out the script reference that was before the meta description was causing the problem. I moved <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> to be the first item after the opening head tag and this is no longer an issue. Thanks for all the comments..

P.S I wasn't the one who code this page, and only working on localizing it, thats why I didn't even think that meta tag being after script would even make a difference...

Answer 2

Try to send appropriate header, something like this:

header("Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8");

Answer 3

Try using UTF8_encode on your content:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.utf8-encode.php

Answer 4

If you have some text you want to store in a DB and display even if the page encoding is latin-1, there is a free tool that can convert Unicode to escaped HTML:

http://www.sprawk.com/tools/escapeUnicode