[CTAKES-508] HTMLTextWriter encodes some characters incorrectly in Firefox

• Type: Bug
• Status: Open
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 4.0.0
• Component/s: ctakes-core
• Labels: easyfix html writer
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Sean Mullane
• Created: 07/May/18 19:09
• Updated: 07/May/18 19:09

Description

Some documents output by the HTML pretty text writer (org.apache.ctakes.core.cc.pretty.html.HtmlTextWriter) show up in Firefox 59.0.3 with the A-with-circumflex character showing up where there should be a &nbsp, as described in the StackOverflow post below (in an unrelated context):

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1461907

This seems to be because the writer implicitly uses UTF-8 but does not specify an encoding in the HTML file. Firefox defaults to Western rather than UTF-8 and so displays characters incorrectly.

This could be solved by adding a META tag to the HTML documents that are written and specifying UTF-8 encoding.