Set charset in ErrorDocument messages
Terrific question!! I must say. I had to dig all my resources and read lot of manuals to find the reason for this behavior.
It appears to be a known behavior but not very well covered in official manuals. Finally, I found one reference of it in this Apache manual:
suppress-error-charset
Available in versions after 2.0.54
When Apache issues a redirect in response to a client request, the response includes some actual text to be displayed in case the client can't (or doesn't) automatically follow the redirection. Apache ordinarily labels this text according to the character set which it uses, which is ISO-8859-1.
However, if the redirection is to a page that uses a different character set, some broken browser versions will try to use the character set from the redirection text rather than the actual page. This can result in Greek, for instance, being incorrectly rendered.
Setting this environment variable causes Apache to omit the character set for the redirection text, and these broken browsers will then correctly use that of the destination page.
And that is exactly the behavior you're seeing that charset=iso-8859-1 is coming in the headers.
How to fix:
Have your .htaccess code like this:
# set desired env variable to suppress iso-8859-1 charsetSetEnvIf Host ^ suppress-error-charset# set desired 403 message with desired charset ErrorDocument 403 "<html><head><meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=utf-8'></head><body>Error 403 - Esta ubicación no es pública</body></html>"Please note that SetEnvIf Host ^ is a condition that will always hold true hence suppress-error-charset will always be set. I have tested just with those 2 lines in my .htaccess and got correct error message displayed in my browser.