So I have my little website (linked in signature).  Now with being in Japan, I sometimes put some Japanese kana in my posts and till now have been happily encoding the text file as UTF-8 which seemed to work quite happily.  This was until someone pointed out that one of my dates is showing ‘0th April’.  this number is read out of the text file directly and should be 29th. 
If I change the encoding back to ANSI then the date comes up happily enough but the kana becomes a stream of characters.

Example is http://www.mattclaridge.com/blog/post.php?y=2006&m=104&d=129

Any ideas of how to fix this?  :?

Can you show us the “original” text file that’s being read? The page displayed has already been rendered so it’s hard to see what’s going on.

http://www.mattclaridge.com/files.zip

This zip file contains index.php, entries.inc and 129.inc.

Index calls entries.inc, which in turn calls 129.inc.

The *.inc files are just text files so open with notepad.

Appologies in advance for the budget coding.  I was teaching myself as I went along but I’m sure you’ll work out what’s going on

It’s a little hard to tell from the code. I suspect that the problem may be in another one of your includes….possibly the “month” or “ordinal” includes which I assume produces the code that assembles the date.

hmm I don’t think it’s either of those two includes because they’re doing what they’re meant to and would say ‘default’ if not.

When you load up the page the encoding is in Western (ISO).  If the blog entry is encoded in ANSI and IE set to Unicode (UTF-8 ) then it all works happily…

So I guess the easiest thing would be to force the browser to use UTF-8 instead of ISO when the page loads.
I have this code in the blog index.php file but it obviously isn’t setting the encoding of the browser: