Bug #688 Updated: HTML special characters switched to meta-ASCII in form input

ID: 688 Updated by: jaakko Reported By: whit@transpect.com Status: Closed Bug Type: MySQL related Assigned To: jaakko Comments: The conversion from HTML entity &#233; happens in the client browser. Browsers interpret the HTML code and HTML entities. They display to the user and then send the actual data as the form data, that means the actual ISO-8859-1 é (e-acute), to the server. It is of course encoded with application/x-www-form-urlencoded type of codes during the transport, but this has nothing to do with the problem as this encoding is again decoded in PHP. So your script gets the actual data, not just some encoding. There are several things you can now do to fix your system. 1) Store characters as characters in your database. Mysql by default is binary safe, so you can store ISO-8859-1 as pure 8-bit encoding (ie. no encoding) there. Why not do so and forget about the rest? Actually this would help you also with the searches, as MySQL knows by default how to do case-insensitive searches with ISO-8859-1 characters, so this way you can search with: .... where field like '%PERCÉ%' ... and find what you are looking for. I recommend this approach. 2) When printing the fields in the form, you can encode the & characters in the fields, so that the browser does not decode them: value="<? echo htmlspecialchars ($string) ?>" but of course the browser also displays them as &#233; to the user then. 3) You can encode them back in your code with some function of your own in PHP. I still recommend option 1). 4) we could write a function to PHP that encodes non-ascii characters with &# -codes rather than ISO-8859-1 names. I do not see the immediate need, but it could be a good idea. I still recommend option 1) for you. Full Bug description available at: http://ca.php.net/bugs.php3?id=688 -- PHP Development Mailing List http://www.php.net/ To unsubscribe send an empty message to php-dev-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For help: php-dev-help@lists.php.net