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My browser has automatic detection of character encoding; why can I use that instead of trial and error to discover the correct encoding to use?

April 26, 2017automatic browser character detection discover encoding Error trial

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My browser has automatic detection of character encoding; why can I use that instead of trial and error to discover the correct encoding to use?

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Current versions of both Internet Explorer and Mozilla have excellent automatic detection of character encoding. These work by looking at the distribution of character codes on the page in question and comparing them to the distributions for typical text in different languages using different encodings. However, they will not override encoding tags such as the CONTENT=”text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1″ present in the FreeDB HTML pages. Most corrections from FreeDB can be made by forcing encoding to UTF-8. You may get useful results by clicking through to the FreeDB text version of the page (look for the hexadecimal number hyperlink on the ids line: e.g. ids: misc / 220eca26 on this will take you to that. Try these with your browser and see if it displays the correct Japanese text on the second (text) page. Be sure that you have selected (checked) View -> Encoding -> Auto-Select for Internet Explorer, or View -> Character Coding -> Auto-Detect -> Universal for Mozilla. The Konqueror browse