Posts Tagged ‘PHP’
JavaScript uses url-encoded UTF-8 strings to perform Ajax POSTs
Today, I had an encoding issue with a website I was working on. I had a
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
tag in the <head>-section, to ensure the page would correctly display and interpret all characters, including accented ones, like à and é.
The page was an administration page, to update texts on a website. Everything worked fine when I used standard <form> and <input>-tags, but I wanted to use Ajax to save any changes – to avoid a full page reload when something simple as a title had to be modified – things started to go wrong.
I used the spectacular jQuery library to do that, using a $.post-statement. At first sight, this seemed to be working fine, until I used some accented characters. When I entered “Soirée Théâtre” as title, the characters “Soirée Théâtre” were stored in the database.
I first thought it was an issue similar to the Bulgarian character set issue in mySQL I encountered a few months ago. But I was just using French in this case, so iso-8859-1 and mySQL character set “latin1_swedish_ci” should suffice in this case.
After some googling, I found this website, that explained that in the case of Ajax POSTs, “JavaScript serializes all the fields and it always uses url-encoded UTF-8 strings for this”. A simple utf8_decode in the PHP program that received the Ajax post-statement solved my issue.
UFT-8 on a website based on mySQL and PHP
I spent quite some time today trying to get the text on a website with Bulgarian characters to show properly. The text is coming out of a MYSQL 5.0 database, configured to use utf8_general_ci and the website is generated by PHP 5.2.5.
I knew I had to use
meta equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″
to display the Bulgarian characters properly (like Велико Търново) and that worked fine for static text, but I got ???????? when using the text from the database.
I tried all sorts of things, and visited various websites with proposed solution, but finally I got it working by one simple setting, explained by this website. I needed to include
mysql_query(‘SET NAMES utf8′);
when connecting to the database. That solved the issue.