Working with many development and production some people forgets to check their default charsets; in the end encoding mismatchs crawl. I’ve seen a few programmers falling in this trap.

Last time our php was Latin-1 encoded and the production Apache server used Utf-8 by default. In a shared hosting environments the default encoding can be set from the .htaccess file:

AddCharset ISO-8859-1 .php
AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1

Same thing from php:

PHP. Use the header() function before generating any content, e.g.:
header(’Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8′);

Links and discussion:

• Basics on http charset parameter at w3c.
• Apache .htacces usage.
• Handy list of IANA accepted encoding names recognized by apache.