Home Theater Forum - View Single Post - Firefox vrs IE character encoding problem

Jay H · 03-24-2008, 01:13 PM

trying to assist my sister at work she has a PC running Firefox and a coworker's PC running IE. She tries to look at some town ordinances website and it works fine in IE but all of a sudden, it stopped loading the .gifs (scanned stuff) returning the 'x' icon of a misloaded picture.

the website seems to be coded in .asp (active server pages) if that makes a difference.

I troubleshooted it a bit and found that for some reason, firefox is not decoding the URL of the image correctly and hence, returns the bad image icon. When I found the URL of the image via IE, I was able to compare that to what firefox was trying to load (via the right click context menu 'view image) and what firefox seems to be loading is an incorrect URL. For some reason, when firefox decodes the URL, it adds a bunch of inappropriate characters and hence, fails to load a bunch of images.

Upon looking at what firefox tried to load, it added something like "%BD%BE%BF" to the image between the base name and the .gif extension, I found that if I viewed the image and then manually deleted that, the .gif would load properly. For example, in firefox when I viewed the image URL it would be something like:

http://www.ordinances]ordinance.com - Your single source for up to date and accurate zoning and land use information and maps........[snip]picture1%BD%BE%BF.gif

However, it should be the

http://www.ordinances]ordinance.com - Your single source for up to date and accurate zoning and land use information and maps........[snip]picture1.gif

I tried changing firefox's character encoding and tried everything that seemed to make any sense, from UTF-8 to UTF-16 and tried all the western european ISO character sets. The IE was set to (Western European ISO).

Nothing worked.. Is this a problem with the HTML developer or is this a problem with firefox now??? It used to work fine up to a certain point and I don't know what the website changed... Should I have her contact the website developer to see if they can correct it. I bet firefox is somehow reading something into the picture links it shouldn't be and then not knowing how to convert that to a character. That's my experience with seeing the %XX characters in places, usually it's a character conversion problem.

Jay

03-24-2008, 01:13 PM	#1 of 5
Jay H *Jay* Member Location: NJ Join Date: Mar 1999 Local Time: 11:05 PM Local Date: 08-21-2008 Posts: 7,869	Firefox vrs IE character encoding problem trying to assist my sister at work she has a PC running Firefox and a coworker's PC running IE. She tries to look at some town ordinances website and it works fine in IE but all of a sudden, it stopped loading the .gifs (scanned stuff) returning the 'x' icon of a misloaded picture. the website seems to be coded in .asp (active server pages) if that makes a difference. I troubleshooted it a bit and found that for some reason, firefox is not decoding the URL of the image correctly and hence, returns the bad image icon. When I found the URL of the image via IE, I was able to compare that to what firefox was trying to load (via the right click context menu 'view image) and what firefox seems to be loading is an incorrect URL. For some reason, when firefox decodes the URL, it adds a bunch of inappropriate characters and hence, fails to load a bunch of images. Upon looking at what firefox tried to load, it added something like "%BD%BE%BF" to the image between the base name and the .gif extension, I found that if I viewed the image and then manually deleted that, the .gif would load properly. For example, in firefox when I viewed the image URL it would be something like: http://www.ordinances]ordinance.com - Your single source for up to date and accurate zoning and land use information and maps........[snip]picture1%BD%BE%BF.gif However, it should be the http://www.ordinances]ordinance.com - Your single source for up to date and accurate zoning and land use information and maps........[snip]picture1.gif I tried changing firefox's character encoding and tried everything that seemed to make any sense, from UTF-8 to UTF-16 and tried all the western european ISO character sets. The IE was set to (Western European ISO). Nothing worked.. Is this a problem with the HTML developer or is this a problem with firefox now??? It used to work fine up to a certain point and I don't know what the website changed... Should I have her contact the website developer to see if they can correct it. I bet firefox is somehow reading something into the picture links it shouldn't be and then not knowing how to convert that to a character. That's my experience with seeing the %XX characters in places, usually it's a character conversion problem. Jay You are the crispy noodle in the vegetarian salad of life