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On my website visitors can do some inline editing. I use ajax for it with a MySQL database and PHP. I expect the Dutch language to be used on the website.

My challenge is to get the character encoding to work well.

I could use advice on:

  • the database (do i use utf-8? latin1_swedish_ci)
  • the tables in the database (i'd prefer to heve them similar to the database.)
  • the escaping to use in the ajax call (x = escape(x);)
  • the webpage character set (UTF-8? ISO-something?)
  • how this all works together.

I use nicEdit as javascript wysiwyg editor.

I could of course explain what happens whan I want to save ë and if that helps I will, but I figured it would be best to understand the matter instead of just trying to quick-fix it.

[EDIT] To elaborate:

I use these in my PHP
$input = stripslashes($input); //(if magic quotes are 'on')
$input = mysql_real_escape_string($input);
$input = strip_tags($input, '<strong><em><span><ul><ol><p><a><br><li>');

In my htmlpage:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

Javascript:
x = excape(x);

Database:
MySQL connection collation: utf8_general_ci
Table options: DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8

This is an example of what happens:

I enter (inline) the word Rëg (using 'option+u' then 'e' on my mac).
I save the word. It shows like this: R�g on the webpage.
In the database i find Rëg.

I open the editor, do nothing but save again and it shows: R%uFFFDg in the database as well as on the page. After that it does not change anymore.

Any help is greatly appreciated.
Kim

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  • Commenting because it's not a complete answer, but: The escaping prior to database entry must be done server-side, not client-side. You can't trust anything coming from the client, even if you've put validation on the client-side. Commented Sep 9, 2010 at 7:37
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    Yes, utf-8 is a way to go. The rest can be solved eventually. Commented Sep 9, 2010 at 7:38
  • if you want to understand the matter, do not make a big mess of completely different matters. Database is one matter, HTML is other and AJAX is another. Take each one and figure out separately Commented Sep 9, 2010 at 7:41
  • ë is not weird and do not require any escaping. The only issue you may experience is AJAX response which can be easily decoded. Commented Sep 9, 2010 at 7:48
  • @T.J. Crowder Thanks for your remark, i indeed make use of some verification before putting stuff in my dB Commented Sep 9, 2010 at 10:52

2 Answers 2

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It shows like this: R�g on the webpage.

You need to instruct the webbrowser that you're displaying the webpage in UTF-8 and that it should interpret it as the same. Add the following to top of your PHP, before emitting any character to the output:

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

Only the <meta> tag is not enough. This is not used by the webbrowser. It's the response header which counts. By the way, Javascript's escape() function is deprecated.

See also:

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4 Comments

Thanks BalusC. I added the line just below the session_start() but still the ë is shown as diamond with questionmark. And thatnks for the hint on deprecated function, i'll replace it.
And thanks again, BelusC :-) Replacing escape with encodeURIComponent did the trick.
Oh, you're submitting the form using JS? Btw, it's BalusC with an a, not e. And indeed, to mark a problem solved, you don't need to add some yelling to the question title, but just mark the most helpful answer accepted :) See also stackoverflow.com/faq
LOL (i mean 'lol') i wasn't jelling, i was cheering from happiness, BalusC. Check is added, I'll change the title again...
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Just use UTF-8 for everything, and normally it will just work.

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3 Comments

Hey Reinis, i do not know how to use UTF-8 for everything. I believe i read somewhere that javascript uses some ISO coding. How do i change that?
You can add a charset="utf-8" attribute to your external script elements to load them as utf-8. It's only required if you have unescaped string literals, though. CSS allows you to use @charset 'utf-8';, but this too is only required if you have unescaped string literals in your CSS, and it's rare. As for everything else, just set it to use UTF-8. Use an utf8 collation in MySQL, a Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8 header for HTML etc.
Thank you Reinis, i did all that already, as i described in my post above (the edited in part). It turned out that i used the wrong escape thingy in my javascript. Bah. But thanks again for your elaborate answer.

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