Page detected as UTF-8 by browsers when it has 'ISO-8859-1' as meta charset

Question

I'm dealing with a site transfer, and in the process my charset got fouled up. At first, I transferred all files with no alterations, and the files on the new server showed <?> icons for special characters. A glance at the browser's character encoding (Chrome and FF) told me it was auto-detecting UTF-8. The meta charset of pages is set to ISO-8859-1. Copy is drawn from various tables in multiple databases (don't ask).

On the original site, all displayed as it should. On the new site, <?>... I dug into it, found default charset ="UTF-8" in php.ini, set it to nothing. Now the majority of pages on the site display fine, the browser recognizes the meta charset tag, everybody's happy; that is, until I navigate to a folder off root.

The files in this folder, although their meta charset is ISO-8859-1, are somehow telling the browser to be read as UTF-8, which means I'm seeing <?> on these pages. If I set the browser to read as ISO-8859-1, then it displays fine. Auto-detect resets it to UTF-8. Any ideas?

Thank you!

Update (added from comment below):

I ran the page through the W3C checker as recommended by martinstoeckli, and it tells me that the HTTP Content-Type is Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 while the meta tag is <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"/>, which gives me a Conflicting character encoding declarations error. Crazy thing is, I can't for the life of me figure out where the UTF-8 declaration is coming from! It's nowhere in any file, all files were saved UTF-8 w/out BOM, the php.ini is set to declare no default, the folder's .htaccess is set like PatomaS suggests.

(For what it's worth, Mozilla's Web Sniffer confirms HTTP header Content-Type of text/html; charset=utf-8.)

Update: While we did not reach a solution to this problem as I posed it, I did decide that the best way to resolve my character encoding issues is to refactor everything to use UTF-8 encoding. Of course, this probably means you will see me on here with more exciting newbie questions like "Just why won't utf8-encode() do my łâùñdrÿ?"

Of course, that means the mystery remains: what is causing the server to send HTTP Content-type charset headers of UTF-8 when it appears that everything is configured differently?

Answer 1

PHP 5.6 comes with a new default charset directive set to UTF-8, in some case this may be a problem with pages served in metatag as latin1 and may be cause of conflicts in validation service, you can override this directive by calling ini_set('default_charset', 'iso-8859-1') in your scripts.

For doing that put on each php file you want to be coded to latin1 this piece of code at the beginning of your scripts:

example: index.php

<?php
  $server_root = realpath($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]);
  $config_serv = "$server_root/php/config.php";
  include("$config_serv");
?>

Then create a folder "php" under your root website and put this piece of code into config.php:

example: config.php

<?php
  ##########################################################################
  # Server Directive - Override default_charset utf-8 to latin1 in php.ini #
  ##########################################################################
  @ini_set('default_charset', 'ISO-8859-1');
?>

If your php.ini is set to latin1 (ISO-8859-1) and you want serve a utf-8 (unicode) page you can force encoding using the same way but putting instead of iso-8859-1, utf-8. Look at that:

example: config.php

<?php
  ##########################################################################
  # Server Directive - Override default_charset latin1 to utf-8 in php.ini #
  ##########################################################################
  @ini_set('default_charset', 'UTF-8');
?>

I hope you find my answer useful, I solved my problem in this way! I had problems with firefox and its html/css validator that given my pages as latin1 and the headers as utf-8. This conflict is solved! I finally solved using my answer.