cgi dat coruption by Internet Explorer 5.0

Sun May 13 15:11:17 EDT 2001

In article <9dmeba010f7 at news2.newsguy.com>, "Alex Martelli"
<aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote:

> "Micheas" <micheas at earthlink.net> wrote in message
> news:20010513.085031.1953443376.882 at linux.earthlink.net...
>> What I am doing:
>> I am writing a cgi script in python that connects to a sybase database.
>>  The web server is apache on FreeBSSD4.3.  The application lives on an
>> intranet with trusted clients so I can dictate what browsers have
>> access to the web page and I don't have to be paranoid about security
>> when parsing submissions.
>> The problem:
>>  IE at seemingly random times return 5 character values that begin
>> with a '+' and end with '-' and three letters in the middle for commas,
>> ampersands, dollar signs, etc. This only happens about 5% of the time
> 
> What HTTP headers is your cgi script returning, exactly?  It looks like
> the set of HTTP headers and attributes is incomplete and IE5 is
> "guessing" at the encoding -- maybe if you specify more fully you'll be
> able to avoid such "guesses" and get predictable behavior.
> 
> 
> Alex

Content-type: text/html

<HTML>
<Head>
</Head>

Is the output of the script.
should content-type be something else? or should I be specifying the
encoding with a meta tag? and if so what should it be?

Thank you very much for your help I have found next to nothing on the web but I
haven't known exactly what my problem is just the symptoms.

--Micheas