any thought on how to accomplish this

[gunner]

detect whether a particular encoding system is installed, example, detect Windows-1251 encoding is and detect if another encoding system is set in the browser, basically trying to see if the typography matches the encoding structure. If you visit the link below you will see what i mean:
http://www.russianlocalization.com/Texts/Encoding.htm

[Roy Sinclair]

The navigator.language will tell you the language version of the user's browser but I don't know of any way to get all the languages it can render.

[gunner]

Is it safe to say then , that JS is limited in this way ?

[ca_redwards]

You may recognize String.fromCharCode(65) as an "A" character. Thus,


if (String.fromCharCode(65) == "A") {/*capital "A" as expected*/}
else {/*an unusual charset!*/}


Using high-numbered CharCodes, you ought to be able to render characters that are unique to particular charsets. Look in the appendix of your favorite HTML book, and you just might find the distinctive characters you need! :thumbsup: