Mongrel’s Default Charset

I suddenly noticed that my last entry had Unicode problems. How embarrassing. It turns out that mongrel doesn’t set a default charset, so the usual caveats apply. Looking through the mongrel docs, you can do something with the -m option, but it still seems difficult to apply a default universally.

Thankfully, I’m proxying to mongrel via Apache. So correcting the situation turned out to be as simple as adding this to my VirtualHost config.

  AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

I was actually not sure that this would work, because Apache is proxying rather than serving files directly. But it does work. I suspect that it may not work un der Apache 1.3, but that would need to be confirmed.

But now the error is corrected and I’m Unicode happy once more. Hurrah!