Characters displaying correctly on localhost, not on test server

[eluser]RJ[/eluser]
Hello,

Two images attached, one from my local host and Arabic is properly displayed. The other from my test server, which does have Arabic character set installed, will not display correctly.

Any ideas?

[eluser]TheFuzzy0ne[/eluser]
Install the Arabic character set?

Where does the data come from? Is it in a static HTMl file? Are you're pages valid, and sporting the proper encoding declaration, i.e <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

[eluser]RJ[/eluser]
Language comes from language file form_validation_lang.php, used just like any English lang file in CI. Pages I believe to be valid. you can view here Here.

working on this page on the same server does work Here

[eluser]TheFuzzy0ne[/eluser]
I still count [url="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://test.findwhere.com:9021/s/ar/shop/device&charset;=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0"]73 errors on the page[/url], but I don't think that's your problem in this instance, although it can still help. Is there any reason why this character table can't be installed on the server?

[eluser]RJ[/eluser]
Character table, can you explain?

[eluser]tomcode[/eluser]
The page is rendered with charset ISO 8859-1 instead of utf-8. If I change the encoding manully to utf-8, the page displays properly (on Mac in Safari and FF).

This is due to the headers sent by the server (it sends Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1).
The invalid markup prohibits probably the inline meta to become active, but it might be that the doctype is not recognized.

[eluser]RJ[/eluser]
yea the character encoding is throwing those W3 errors. weird though, the link to working arabic doesnt have that issue, maybe because ran through Joomla CMS?? i dont know. so the only way to fix it in your experience is to have the character tables installed on the server like utf8, etc?

i must sound like an idiot, but i appreciate your assistance

[eluser]tomcode[/eluser]
I do not know what You mean by character tables, if You mean fonts, no, the fonts are the ones of the visitor's machine, there are no fonts installed on the server.

Your server sends (by default) an instruction to the browser, which character encoding to use (in Your case ISO-8859-1).

You have now two possibilites :
1. Send a header in Your PHP with utf-8
2. As You have already, put a meta tag into Your page, but this meta may not be recognized as long as the markup contains too many errors.

Code:

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");

[eluser]TheFuzzy0ne[/eluser]
Sorry, by character table I was referring to character sets, as the original post mentioned that it wasn't installed.

[eluser]RJ[/eluser]
I think we're in business with this one! Added the header php code, fixed a bunch of the errors and appears to be working... for now .

Thanks