Hi there
I want people to be able to input foreign characters into a PHP POST form.
Mostly this is fine. By typing Alt 132 the a umlaut shows in the form, and most accented and umlaut characters can be done this way.
However this Alt system uses the old extended ASC II numbers and the sz ligature, representing the sharp ss sound in German was not included in this character set. This is that strange double S symbol.
When the move was made to iso8859-1 etc the a umlaut had a completely different number, 228. The sz ligature in German is 223.
I can make the program work OK by telling the user to use a different Alt number and doing a conversion of the posted variable; but this is unsatisfactory as the user's input looks strange and is confusing for them.
For example I could tell them to input ~s or even zs. Cannot use sz as this occurs in a lot of German words.
What I would like I suppose is a way of making the PHP INPUT FORM accept the new numbers so that Alt - 223 would give the ss ligature. I have tried using charset - iso8859-1 in the form but this does not seem to work; unless my scripting is wrong.
Have changed the charset at the top of the page, but no diff. In fact Microsoft Word seems to use the old numbers when inputting Alt-132, not the new ones, even if the language is set to German.
Has anyone managed to change the character set for a PHP input form.
Is there any way of doing the conversion of the character to say ß before it is displayed in the text box; not as far as I can see.
Hmm! I suppose it all works OK in Germany as they have German keyboard which behaves itself.
Any other bright ideas??
You can see the preliminary site at http://www.mancomp.co.nz, and go to The mancomp German Page. You can even check your knowledge of German verb conjugation for a few verbs :-)
Paul
