: After change to new software stack, Chinese pages require setting encoding in browser We changed to a new server with a completely upgraded software stack, including apache 2.4 and php 5.6.9.

@Kevin317

We tried lots of things but finally got something to work. We have to send a header before sending any other output. Thus the cause proposed by Simon Hayter is correct, and our solution implements the correction.

Here is what the first two lines or our code looks like:

<?php
header('Content-Type:text/html;charset=gb18030');


We believe the root cause is that the default action for apache changed between version 2.2 and 2.4, which was part of our stack upgrade. Apparently version 2.4 sets the default charset to UTF-8 in the header, and nothing we tried (of many apache configuration options) was able to change that. No matter what we tried, 2.4 sent the following header:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8


On the other hand, our apache 2.2 was sending the following header:

Content-Type: text/html


There were no other significant difference in the server output (which was obtained via curl).

As I said, we could not get the apache 2.4 to not send the charset=UTF-8, even with using AddDefaultCharset, etc.

So the workaround is to have php send a header as shown above.

I am attaching an image of part of a diff, showing what I am talking about.The difference marked "17" shows the difference.

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