First we must edit the httpd.conf. Search for AddDefaultCharset and set it to utf-8:
AddDefaultCharset utf-8
Then we must be sure that the content that we are going to serve is stored on the file system in utf-8 as well. If this is not the case we will have wired behavior, with characters not displayed correctly. Unfortunately in linux is not possible to discover which is the encoding of a file, so the quickest way will be to verify directly the output on the browser. Linux in any case provide a quick way to convert from an encoding to another:
iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 index.html > index.html.utf8
then we can simply:
mv -f index.html.utf8 index.html
Pay attention that iconv do NOT check the source file encoding. This means that if you apply this command to a file that is already stored with utf-8 encoding it will simply produce a wired file as output.
Last but not least, i would suggest you to avoid to put inside the page:
<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
because in any case the parameters passed by apache through the http header will override it.
PS I've created a small script to modify a bunch of file in a row. It accept a search like parameter :
#!/usr/bin/ksh
USAGE="usage:
if (( $# < 1 )) then
print $USAGE;
exit;
elif (( $# > 1 )) then
print $USAGE;
exit;
fi
for file in *$1*
do
if [[ $file = *html* ]]
then
iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 $file > $file.utf8;
mv -f $file.utf8 $file;
echo $file;
fi
done
