A web page contains only cryptic characters

WebSite-Watcher 4.42 - Homepage - Help-Start - Topics - Previous - Next

Normally the content of a page is available in a specific language, for example in English, German or Japanese. Dependent from the used language, the page can contain some special characters which are only available in that language. To ensure, that the page is shown correctly, the language definition should be stored directly in the page or reported by the server.

If neither, the page nor the server log defines the page's language, WebSite-Watcher is not able to select the correct character set (codepage) automatically. In that case it is possible to see all characters as hieroglyphs or only a few invalid characters within the page.

To fix that behavior, you have to define the character set manually.

Open the online version of the page in the internal browser
Select the correct codepage via the context menu
Open the bookmark properties
Select the Options tab
Click the [...] button on the right side of the "Character set" field
Select the menu entry "Use selected character set from internal browser"

The setting "Enforce Unicode/UTF-8" will convert a page to the UTF-8 format, independently of the used original format (also &#NNNN; encoded Unicode characters will be converted).