International characters not displayed in pages served by dispatcher

Symptoms

You have a page which includes some special characters (for example "umlaut"). When you request the page from dispatcher you cannot see the characters. However if you request the same page from the Communique instance directly you can see the characters.

Cause

Http headers are not cached in dispatcher and you are probably storing the encoding in the header.

Resolution

There are 2 solutions:

1. If you use only one encoding, make sure that the encoding you use on the web server is the same as the default encoding of the Communique instance.

2. Use a <META> tag in the HTML header to set the encoding, such as:

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=EUC-JP">