Dropbox and UTF8

[VectraMan]

I have a UTF8 .htm file, with the appropriate <meta charset="UTF-8"/> in the header, and this works fine as a local file, or off a webserver. Unfortunately if I upload it to dropbox (i.e. copying into my Dropbox/public folder in Windows) and access it public link, Dropbox decides to serve it back as ANSI and any unicode characters get garbled.

Anyone know a way around this?

[NickFitz]

Looking at the Dropbox forums, it seems to be a known issue, due to them choosing a stupid default encoding. See for example https://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=45228 and https://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=59314.

Apparently they were "aware of the issue" early last year but people were still complaining as of a month ago

You could try putting a BOM at the start of the file. Pain in the arse though.

[VectraMan]

Thanks. All seems very poor. The BOM runs the risk of some webserver, or other bit of software not understanding what it is. Plus it's stupid, and was only meant to be for plain text files, not for HTML that has a field telling you what the format is.