[Maciek]

When I put symbols which are part of a different language on my website, the symbols can't be read and are turned into gibberish. How do I make symbols appear as they should be on websites? When I search a symbol online like on wikipedia, it appears without problem, but when I put the symbol on my website, it doesn't show up on the browser as the same symbol.

What can I do?

[haku]

Its very likely an encoding issue. Depends on the symbols in question though. Are you doing static of dynamic sites? Either way, if you switch your charsets to utf-8, it will probably solve the problem, although you may still run into issues with Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK).

[Maciek]

sorry ive never switched character sets.. how do you switch your charsets to utf-8? and im only working with Polish.

[haku]

Are you doing a static or dynamic site?

[Maciek]

How do you classify it as dynamic or static? why would it matter? Ummm, I have php form and I used cookies and some other functional code if that makes it dynamic.

[haku]

If the Polish text is being passed through PHP anywhere, you will have to change the internal charset for PHP. But for the time being, lets assume that no Polish text will be passed through PHP and that your problems are static.

Add this to the head of your document:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=uft-8" />

Then open your documents, choose 'save as', and then in your save-as dialogue, save the document with utf-8 encoding (this is important and necessary). However depending on your editing software, this may not be the right place to choose the document encoding. But for most software, it is.