Specifying charset in HTTP header with Lighttpd - character-encoding

Question

I'm trying to specify a charset in the HTTP header of my Lighttpd-setup. I've tried numerous suggestions I've found throughout StackExchange's websites.
1. Tried looking in the mime.types file, so I could just add ; charset=utf-8 at the end of whatever file-types I wanted to specify a charset for in the HTTP header, but the mime.types-file is looking nothing like I expected: http://pastebin.com/QMKJ8Lqj
2. Tried changing create-mime.assign.pl from this:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
open MIMETYPES, "/etc/mime.types" or exit;
print "mimetype.assign = (\n";
my %extensions;
while(<MIMETYPES>) {
chomp;
s/\#.*//;
next if /^\w*$/;
if(/^([a-z0-9\/+-.]+)\s+((?:[a-z0-9.+-]+[ ]?)+)$/) {
foreach(split / /, $2) {
# mime.types can have same extension for different
# mime types
next if $extensions{$_};
$extensions{$_} = 1;
print "\".$_\" => \"$1\",\n";
}
}
}
print ")\n";
Into this:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
open MIMETYPES, "/etc/mime.types" or exit;
print "mimetype.assign = (\n";
my %extensions;
while(<MIMETYPES>) {
chomp;
s/\#.*//;
next if /^\w*$/;
if(/^([a-z0-9\/+-.]+)\s+((?:[a-z0-9.+-]+[ ]?)+)$/) {
my $pup = $1;
foreach(split / /, $2) {
# mime.types can have same extension for different
# mime types
next if $extensions{$_};
next if not defined $pup;
next if $pup eq '';
$extensions{$_} = 1;
if ($pup =~ /^text\//) {
print "\".$_\" => \"$pup; charset=utf-8\",\n";
} else {
print "\".$_\" => \"$pup\",\n";
}
}
}
}
print ")\n";
And restarted the Lighttpd server afterwards - nothing.
3. Afterwards I tried adding the following to the lighttpd.conf file:
mimetype.assign = (
".css" => "text/css; charset=utf-8",
".html" => "text/html; charset=utf-8",
".htm" => "text/html; charset=utf-8",
".js" => "text/javascript; charset=utf-8",
".text" => "text/plain; charset=utf-8",
".txt" => "text/plain; charset=utf-8",
".xml" => "text/xml; charset=utf-8"
)
And it gave me an error that it couldn't restart the Lighttpd server, because it found duplicate config variables of the "mimetype.assign" variable - one in create-mime.assign.pl and one in lighttpd.conf. I know I could try by removing include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/create-mime.assign.pl" from lighttpd.conf, so that there isn't any duplicate config variables, but what about all the other mime-types?
General info:
Lighttpd version: 1.4.28
PHP version: 5.3.29-1
Linux: Debian 6.0 Squeeze
Lighttpd.conf: http://pastebin.com/N6GrdUsi

Answer 1

Please try a newer version of lighttpd.
I am looking at 1.4.36 and doc/scripts/create-mime.conf.pl contains a list of extensions to which it appends "; charset=utf-8"
# text/* subtypes to serve as "text/...; charset=utf-8"
# text/html IS NOT INCLUDED: html has its own method for defining charset
# (<meta>), but the standards specify that content-type in HTTP wins over
# the setting in the html document.
my %text_utf8 = map { $_ => 1 } qw( # ......
You can find it in the git sources: https://github.com/lighttpd/lighttpd1.4/blob/master/doc/scripts/create-mime.conf.pl