capture ii8n characters in html form entry

rxs0569

New in Php

Wrote a simple HTML based form that when submitted to a php file captures form text box data and writes to a xml file. everythings works fine until i realized a user can enter non ascii characters also... for example chinese.

my problem is how do i capture the form data and convert each character to UTF8 or maybe in this from "&#XXXX;"

can some one show me how to do this

bpat1434

Well, you can limit the characters to english only using a simple loop:

$str = $_POST['text']; // Form posted text
$error = FALSE; // set the default error to false, meaning no error

for($i=0; $i<strlen($str); $i++)
{
  $char = ord($str{$i});
  if($char<32 && $char>126 && !=10 && !=13)
  {
    die('Only english characters allowed');
  }
}

ASCII Lookup Table

Of course, you can use the [man]ord[/man] function to get you the ASCII character code for whatever character. You can then use that to replace the illegal characters with the ASCII code.

rxs0569

Thanks

I want to support chinese and other languages. The app capture messages from users and stores it into a xml message

bpat1434

So, you can use the PHP functions hexdec() and decoct() to format characters into different entities....