title: Dealing with ISO-encoding in AJAX requests (prototype)
body: <p>I have a HTML-page, that's encoded in ISO-8859-1 and a Prototype-AJAX call that's build like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>new Ajax.Request('api.jsp', {
      method: 'get',
      parameters: {...},
      onSuccess: function(transport) {
          var ajaxResponse = transport.responseJSON;
          alert(ajaxResponse.msg);
      }
  });
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The api.jsp returns its data in ISO-8859-1. The response contains special characters (German Umlauts) that are not displayed correctly, even if I add a "encoding: ISO-8895-1" to the AJAX-request. Does  anyone know how to fix this?</p>
  
  <p>If I call api.jsp in a new browser window separately the special characters are also corrupt. And I can't get any information about the used encoding in the response header. The response header looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Server  Apache-Coyote/1.1
  Content-Type    application/json
  Content-Length  208
  Date    Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:40:24 GMT
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Notice: Please don't advice the usage of UTF-8. I have to deal with ISO-8859-1.</p>