When IE6 opens an HTML page it determines the file's encoding from either its HTTP header or a META tag like this one.
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
When IE6 opens local text files however no HTTP headers or META tags are available. Instead it appears to assume the file is encoded in the system's active ANSI code page unless a BOM character exists to indicate otherwise. In some cases the encoding can be specified manually using the
View / Encoding
menu item.
The following chart lists test results observed using various file encodings (Internet Explorer 6.0 tested).
Encoding | Byte Order Mark | Test Data | Without
View / Encoding |
With
View / Encoding |
IE6 Encoding Selected |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
cp850 | abc-àèìòù© | Fail | Fail | none found | |
windows-1252 | abc-àèìòù© | Pass | Pass | ||
UTF-8 | abc-àèìòù©-뮻뮼뮽 | Fail | Pass | Unicode (UTF-8) | |
UTF-8 | UTF-8 BOM | abc-àèìòù©-뮻뮼뮽 | Pass | Pass | |
UTF-16LE | abc-àèìòù©-뮻뮼뮽 | Fail | Fail | none found | |
UTF-16 | LE | abc-àèìòù©-뮻뮼뮽 | Pass | Pass | |
UTF-16BE | abc-àèìòù©-뮻뮼뮽 | Fail | Fail | none found | |
UTF-16 | BE | abc-àèìòù©-뮻뮼뮽 | Pass | Pass |