PHP 4.0 Bug #9426: Form variables encoding problem

From: d.sbragion@infotecna.it Operating system: Linux 2.0 PHP version: 4.0.4pl1 PHP Bug Type: Unknown/Other Function Bug description: Form variables encoding problem When I enter some special chars in a textual form field (either 'INPUT TYPE="text"' or 'TEXTAREA') they get encoded like an html entitie. For example this '’' gets encoded as '’' in the variable of the form handling script (I hope this won't trigger the bug, the first char is like a '`' but "reversed", almost like a superscript small '/'). No coding happens for a plain typed '’', so there's no way to distinguish between the two cases in the form handling script and so there's no way to safely reverse the encoding. Browser is IE 5.5 on Windows 98. This may happen for example doing cut & paste from WordPad, Word or existing web pages. I tried the same thing pasting into FrontPage Express. It encodes it as '’' instead of '’', may be it's just the encoding that's wrong. P.S. Sorry for my poor English -- Edit Bug report at: http://bugs.php.net/?id=9426&edit=1