Problem with special characters and multilanguages

Question

Please i have asked this question before, hopin to get responses this time

I created a simple comment wall that submits using ajax.

Using javascript i collect user input:

var sharetxt =  encodeURIComponent(document.getElementById("cw_share_txt").value);

then pass it to a php page, on the php page, i collect the passed data:

$text=nl2br(htmlentities(trim(utf8_decode($_POST["txt"]))));

Encoding of the php page above:

header("Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8");

My problem is that

1. the wall doesnt still support multi languages (displays as ???? and causes my xml not to work)

2. i still problems with some special characters (displays as � or ?)

What am i not doing right? please assist

Answer 1

1. Try to not utf8_decode
2. Try using: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> in the header of the page to display characters correctly

Answer 2

That looks like a classic case of mis-encoding.

I don't think you need the call to utf8_decode(). Since the source page is already declared as UTF-8 then the posted data is UTF-8 and you should a) leave it UTF-8 and b) make sure you declare the target page as UTF-8.

(Also, try in other browsers. IE has a reputation for guessing character sets badly, but (for example) I know Opera gets defensive and submits HTML entities if it can't match the character sets. That might help give you an idea of what is really wrong!)

Answer 3

And also, try to change the encoding of the document. I had the same problem as you and I changed the meta charset and the document encoding, works like a charm.