Help needed with python unicode cgi-bin script

[Duncan Booth]

"weheh" <weheh at verizon.net> wrote:

> Hi Duncan, thanks for the reply.
>>>
>> FWIW, the code you posted only ever attempted to set the character
>> set encoding using an html meta tag which is the wrong place to set
>> it. The encoding specified in the HTTP headers always takes
>> precedence. This is why
>> the default charset setting in Apache was the one which applied.
>>
>> What you should have been doing was setting the encoding in the
>> content- type header. i.e. in this line of your code:
>>
>>   print u"""Content-Type: text/html
>>
>> You should have changed it to read:
>>
>>   Content-Type: text/html; charset=windows-1252
>>
>> but because you didn't Apache was quietly changing it to read:
>>
>>   Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
>>
> Will this work under the following situation? Let's say the user is
> filling out a text field on a form on my website. The user has their
> browser encoding set to utf8. My website has charset=windows-1252 as
> you indicate above. Will I run into a conflict somewhere? 
> 
If you are sending the user a form you should be specifying the acceptable 
character sets with the accept-charset attribute on the form tag. Basically 
the rule should be to pick an appropriate character set and stick to it. 
don't depend on defaults, be explicit.