character encoding - jQuery $.get() charset of reply when no header is set?

Question

I just recently installed Winamp Song Requester wich is a Winamp web song requester plugin with a built in minimal HTTP CGI Server.

What the plugin does is that it runs a web server, serves a html page with some special variables wich it replaces with actual data on request (playlist, request queue, time left in song etc).

I saw this as a fun and good project to learn some jQuery so I started hooking up my own js code to replace, fix and ajaxify the served website from the plugin but I've now run into a problem with character encoding.

On the page you get links to all songs in the playlist. When you click on one of the links I hooked up my own jQuery click function. So instead of reloading the whole page when you request a song I do a $.get($(this).attr('href', function(response) {... code ...}) and then I use replaceWith to replace the current queue with the new generated queue with your request added on the fly. I do the same thing to show/update currently playing and on search so that everything get fetched in the background and then replaced on the fly with some animations added.

All jQuery/Ajax works great but the big problem I have is with charset and with song names in queue/playlist. Special characters (???é etc.) in names doesn't work at all.

The plugin outputs everything in iso-8859-1/latin1 and my meta tag in the markup tells the browser that this page is latin1. On a normal page refresh in the browser this works well and the special characters display as normal. But when I use jQuery and $.get() to replace blocks of code on the fly the special characters only show up as ?.

I think that the problem lies in that jQuery defaults to believe that the $.get() response is UTF-8 if no header says otherwise. The plugin doesn't set any header for encoding/charset at all and since I have no control at all of the backend and what headers get set I can't change this.

The only headers I get in the response from the plugin is:

Server: WinampServer
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

I hope you understand my problem. I've got a page where I have no control at all over the backend and all I have to work with is generated HTML. I can't change or add headers in responses. I need to tell jQuery that the response is actually in latin1 and not UTF-8 so that the encoding of special characters don't break. I've tried the scriptCharset: 'iso-8859-1' in jQuerys ajaxSetup but that only works with type script/json and I'm working with HTML responses.

Any idea if this is possible or any other workaround you could think about?

Answer 1

edit: ok i think this works (at least it worked in my test environment, see revisions for previous attempt)

$.ajaxSetup({
    'beforeSend' : function(xhr) {
        xhr.overrideMimeType('text/html; charset=UTF-8');
    },
});
$('#stuff').load('/yourresource.file'); // your ajax load

what i had was the main file set in UTF-8 and the data file set in ISO-8859-1. without the above code, i got a bunch of garbage for the test string ???é, as expected. with the above code, it loaded ???é properly encoded.