About to commit sepeku - need UTF-8 ...getting ISO-8859-1
 

Deep breath ... deep breath. Grit teeth.

Ok, I've been chasing my tail off and on for about two weeks on this crap.

I have done every recommend thing that I can find in a desperate attempt to get my vBulletin forum to generate UTF-8 encoded pages.

Well, here's the rub. The pages ARE UTF-8 encoded. But for some stinking reason the HTTP Header continues to specify ISO-8859-1.

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

This is driving me absolutely, freaking nuts. WHAT HAVEN'T I DONE?

Ok, starting on a COMPLETELY NEW scraped box. Latest everything, except vBulletin which is 3.6.4

-- My MySQL database is ALL UTF.

-- I installed vBulletin with the config.php UTF-8 line uncommented
$config['Mysqli']['charset'] = 'utf8';

-- I modifed the headerinclude template in vBulletin so that the Meta tag specifies UTF-8
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

-- Apache is set for UTF-8
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

Yet, despite ALL THIS, the freaking http head continues to specifiy
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

WHAT MORE CAN I DO FOLKS?

At first, I thought it was something on the shared host. So I waited two weeks until I could get my own dedicated server set up. Now, I have the totally clean, dedicated server. I installed all this crap, and lo and behold I have the same freaking problem still.

I thought - "it can't be vBulletin ... the page is really UTF-8. The meta tag says UTF-8 ... it must be Apache or PHP"

but, now I don't know, now I think maybe it IS vBulletin f'n me. Because, on the exact same server, I can run wikimedia and the wikimedia pages come down to my client with CORRECT HTTP headers.
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

So, who or what can be the sticking point? This is driving me nuts, as you can see. I will be eternally grateful for the answer to this riddle.

I see that you already had this answered on vB.com.

One more thing to clarify, there are different places that use a characterset:

Storage (Database/Table/Column)
This controls how the data is stored in the database.

Database Connection
This is the one you set in the config.php. It tells MySQL that the data that will be sent from the application will be using this characterset. If it is different from the storage characterset, then MySQL will try to convert the data to the storage characerset.

HTML Characterset
As set in the Language Settings. This is how the data will be sent to your browser.

You need to set the language to UTF-8 in the language manager > edit settings then undo your edit to headinclude