Products
Webtrends Analytics 9.x
Webtrends Analytics 8.x
Issue
Internet Explorer appears to honor the “Content-Type” meta tag on a page and will pass the values however the page is defined. In the case of non-English characters, the page may likely be encoded in UTF-8. In Internet Explorer, if the “Content-Type” is not set to UTF-8, the data passed via JavaScript for the hit will not be interpreted as UTF-8 and may appear as “parameter=????????” instead of the expected non-English characters. This is done at the client/browser level and can be verified using httpwatch or a similar program.
Firefox appears to ignore this setting and correctly interprets the characters as UTF-8 resulting in proper characters being passed when viewed in httpfox or a similar application. As a result, this issue may only occur when Internet Explorer is used.
Resolution
1. Ensure the Content-Type of the page uses the proper encoding for the character type.
For example, on a UTF-8 page place the following meta tag:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
2. After setting the page correctly, it may be possible that the hits are still logged with incorrect characters though they are passed with the proper formatting. If this occurs, ensure that UTF-8 is enabled in IIS logging.