Character encoding issue for french characters

Question

In web application,there is a HTML page with below encoding:

<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">
<meta content="en" http-equiv="Content-language">
<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-type">

What actually happening is on this page I am trying to display a result of a soap request. In response of this soap-request I am getting following codes:

èéàùìçò

for the following characters:

  èéàùìçò

and surprisingly on HTML page these characters are correctly displayed as below besides the page encoding is UTF-8:

èéàùìçò instead of ������� 

I am not able to understand how these codes can be correctly converted in UTF-8 format as these codes belong to ISO-8859-15.Any idea?

Solution

The character references such as è have meanings based on the Unicode numbers of characters, quite independently of the character encoding of the page. This has always been the principle in HTML, and only very early browsers sometimes got this wrong. This is one of the main benefits of using character references.

The first 256 code positions in Unicode are identical with ISO-8859-1 code positions, which in turn are identical with ISO-8859-15 code positions except for a few characters (not including those in your example).