Character Sets of Lasso Files

Explains how Lasso interprets the character set of a Lasso file.

Description

Lasso is Unicode aware. When Lasso reads a file off the server, it does not have a way to know which character set (charset) was used to create the file. So Lasso has fixed rules for interpreting file character sets:

1. Lasso will first look to see if a Byte-Order-Mark (BOM) is present in the file. If it is, then the file's charset is assumed to be UTF-8.
2. If no BOM is present, then Lasso will assume the file's charset is one of the following, depending on the server platform: Linux: ISO-8859-1, OS X: MacRoman, Windows: ISO-8859-1

Problems that manifest with wrong encoding

When there's a mismtach between the file's encoding and Lasso's rules on determining the charset, the net result is the characters displayed to the browser will be incorrect, despite any settings within Lasso Admin or the browser. It is essential to either save all files as UTF-8 with a BOM, or save the file in the server platform's default charset (as outlined above).

Author: Bil Corry
Created: 30 Mar 2008
Last Modified: 16 Mar 2011