CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptajax
mickwaffle
mickwaffle

Reputation: 11

Special characters in my javascript variables keep showing up as �, how do i prevent this?

I have a javascript script which is calling a php page to supply an ajax form with suggestions. The suggestions are returned fine by the php page, but for some reason, when i set the responsetext of the javascript object request as an element in my HTML page, all the special characters (ie. á or ã) show up as this question mark. Is there a function II must run on the response text of the request to make sure these are read properly?

Thanks.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1176

Answers (2)

bobince
bobince

Reputation: 536379

If you are not serving your HTML pages as UTF-8, the browser will guess an encoding, typically a single-byte Windows codepage depending on the user's locale.

But this doesn't happen for AJAX. With XMLHttpRequest, unless you specifically state an encoding in the Content-Type: ...; charset= parameter, the browser will treat it as UTF-8. That means if you are actually serving Windows code page 1252 (Western European) content, you will get an invalid UTF-8 sequence and consequent question mark.

You don't want to be using a non-UTF-8 encoding! Make sure you are using UTF-8 throughout your application. Serve all your pages with Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8, store your data in UTF-8 tables, use mysql_set_charset() to choose UTF-8, etc.

In any case consider passing AJAX responses using JSON. The function json_encode() will create a JSON string that uses JavaScript escape sequences for non-ASCII characters, which avoids any problem of encoding mismatch. Also this is easier to extend to add functionality than returning raw HTML.

Upvotes: 4

Jonathan Beebe
Jonathan Beebe

Reputation: 5226

I would try, in your php script, to encode everything as html entities.

This can be easily tested by doing something like this before returning the results to javascript:

$results = htmlentities($htmlstring);

There's also the htmlspecialchars function you might try.

More about this here:

Upvotes: 0

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