title: HTML encoding: eastern european languages
body: <p>My program is fetching messages from a database, which contains English, German and several Eastern European languages. My Python script sets the encoding via:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;meta  http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and use the values fetched correctly from the database (if I check within my logs). </p>
  
  <p>Unfortunately all browsers I tested (IE8, Firefox 3.0.10, Opera 9.64) switch based on my local language settings to:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Western ISO-8859-1 in Firefox</li>
  <li>Western European (Windows) in IE</li>
  <li>Automatic in Opera</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Everything works fine as soon as I switch the character encoding manually in the browser.</p>
  
  <p>The same happens if I manually generate the HTML file using UTF-8 (tested with TextMate respective jEdit), although both editors display the content correctly.</p>
  
  <p>That works fine for English and German, but i.e. not for Russian. How can I force the "correct" character encoding?</p>
  
  <p><b>ANSWER</b></p>
  
  <p>The following entry within the VirtualHost (Apache configuration) section did the trick for me:</p>
  
  <pre><code>AddDefaultCharset utf-8
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Many thanks for pointing me into the right direction, that helped a lot!</p>