Installation guide

How the Gateway Selects a Character Set
44 Red Hat Directory Server Gateway Customization Guide • April 2005
How the Gateway Selects a Character Set
The gateway can output web pages in many character sets. The gateway selects a character
set for each HTTP client based on a combination of input from the client and from the
gateway's configuration files. The gateway selects a character set for transmission
according to this priority:
• Character set defined in the client's
HTTP Accept-charset header. (This can be
overridden for a particular browser using the
ignoreAcceptCharsetFrom
parameter).
• Character set defined in the client's
HTTP Accept-language header. (For example,
for Japanese, the charset would be defined as
.
.clients/dsgw/ja/dsgwcharset.conf).
• Character set defined in the gateway's
.conf file by the charset parameter.
How the Gateway Selects from Multiple Requested
Characters Sets
When a client includes more than one character set in a request header, and the gateway
supports more than one of these, it selects a character set according to this priority:
•UTF-8
• Of the possible character sets, the character set with the highest Q value (for example,
de;q=1, en;q=0.5, fr;q=0.7 would give German the highest Q value)
• The character set that appears first in the request header.
• Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1)
HTTP Clients that Request UTF-8
Browsers designed for localization are configured to request the UTF-8 character set by
default. To support localization, the gateway is preconfigured to transmit the UTF-8
character set to these clients: Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer. The gateway
allows this preconfiguration to be overridden using the
ignoreAcceptCharsetFrom
parameter. For more information about this parameter, see “ignoreAcceptCharsetFrom,”
on page 97.
The conversion from UTF-8 to the gateway client's chosen character set is performed
shortly before output.