Special characters escaping with JS and PHP

Question

Hi everyone,

my application geting Text from a input field an post it over ajax to a php file for saving it to db.

var title = encodeURIComponent($('#title').val());

if I escape() the title it is all OK but i have Problems with "+" character. So i use the encodeURIComponent().

Now i habe a Problem with german special characters like "ö" "ä" "ü" they will be displayed like a crypdet something....

Have some an idea how can i solve this problem?

Thx

Answer 1

Try replacing that characters, not escaping...

Answer 2

You might use escape("AbcÄüö") and you would get "Abc%C4%FC%F6"

In php you could then use urldecode($myValue) to get "AbcÄüö" again

Answer 3

I suppose this has to do with encoding : your HTML page might be using UTF-8, and the special characters are encoded like this :

>>> encodeURIComponent('ö');
"%C3%B6"

When your PHP page receives this, it has to know it's UTF-8, and deal with it as UTF-8 -- which means that everything on the server-side has to work with UTF-8 :

• PHP code must use functions that can work with multi-byte characters
• The database (db, tables, columns, ...) must use UTF-8 for storing data
• When generating HTML pages, you need to indicate it's UTF-8 too, ...

For instance, if you are using var_dump() on the PHP side to display what's been sent from the client, don't forget to indicate that the generated page is in UTF-8, with something like this :

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

Else, the browser will use it's default charset -- which is not necessarily the right one, and possibly display garbage.