Firefox not displaying CP437

Question

I am developing an application with a Web interface, that is connecting up to an old Cobol mainframe, that uses CP437. We only have one system to communicate with, so if possible I would rather not do any charset conversions, and just use CP437 throughout.

I have changed the headers sent out with the HTML to show CP437 (in both the Apache header, and the meta tag):

Content-Type: text/html; charset=CP437
...
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=CP437">

It works well in internet explorer, with £ signs displaying correctly (pounds sterling, in case that symbol doesn't traslate!).

However, in Firefox, I just get the question marks in their place. In the Web Developer menu, the encoding shows as ISO-8859-1, so it looks like Firefox just doesn't recognise the character set.

Does anyone know how to get these working together? Is there anywhere a list of the character sets that Firefox knows about?

Answer 1

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/intl/locale/src/charsetalias.properties is a close approximation of the charsets Gecko knows about. CP437 is not in fact one of them.

Answer 2

One other thing that you could try is using CP850 which is pretty close to CP437. Some of the box characters differ but I don't think you're using them.