Passing Variables from differnet charsets.

pow3r

I have a multilingual site that uses UTF-8 and Windows-1256 charsets. I set the charsets as variables based on a language cookie system. And disabled the default charset in apache because it kept over riding.

The problem I am having now is that when the page is viewed in windows-1256 (arabic) it wont pass the string in a manner that the server can recognize. It shows the string/variable as question marks.

If someone could please help me with this I can call back the insane asylum and cancel my vacation 😐

Jay

tsinka

Hi,

it's difficult to guess anything since I don't know the code or how the data looks like. But it seems like adding

header("Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8");

on top of the script solves the problem. I tested the following script with Firefox and IE with several different charsets including Japanese. The submitted data always displayed correctly.

<?PHP
header("Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8");

if (isset($_POST['test'])) {
  echo $_POST['test'];
}
?>

<html>
<head>
<title>title</title>
</head>
<body>
<form name="theform" action="<?PHP echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>" method="post">
  <input type="text" name="test">
  <input type="submit" name="submit" value="submit">
</form>
</body>
</html>

So basically that means that you might need to have a strings you want to display in utf-8 format (or convert strings in Windows-1256 encoding to utf-8 first with e.g. iconv before displaying them).

That header causes the browsers (at least the two I tested) to submit the form data in utf-8 format.

Thomas

pow3r

Thanks 🙂