Re: German characters not correct in output webform

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Jan 13 2004 - 16:35:06 EST

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    German characters not correct in output webformAddison Phillips [wM] wrote:
    > When you do a form submit (POST or GET of data to the server),
    > the browser encodes the characters being sent using the character
    > encoding that the page uses.

    Not necessarily: the HTML form can specify the encoding that the
    browser should use when submitting the form data to the server.

    Most problems come when this is not explicitly indicated as an
    attribute of the form, so that browsers determine a default encoding
    to use: normally this should be the same as the current encoding
    of the HTML page. But some other browsers simply use a
    ISO-8859-1 default, or a UTF-8 default.

    Solution: specify explicitly the encoding to use as an attribute of the
    HTML form, and make sure it is the same as the HTML page.
    Then be ready to accept that encoding in your server. Note that
    browsers will normally specify the encoding with which the form data
    was submitted. Look at HTTP headers that come along with the
    POST request.

    Note also that if your form uses the "GET" method with URL-encoding,
    it is strongly recommanded that you encode the form data using the
    same encoding recommanded for URLs (UTF-8) before URL-encoding
    is applied (transformation of non-ASCII characters into sequences of
    %xx). This means that your HTML form page will also need to be encoded
    with UTF-8.

    If your form page uses ISO-8859-1, then specify explicitly the ISO-8859-1
    encoding as the one to use for submitting forms, as an explicit attribute of
    your <form> element. But then visitors won't be able to send other
    characters
    than ISO-8859-1 in their form data, whever the form method is GET with
    URL-encoding, or POST in standard form-data format.



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