Firefox and magically appearing character (Â) when unescaping an ®

Question

I'm unescaping an ® (registration character) in firefox to be submitted in a form, since actually typing that character into Javascript causes the script to behave strangely.

However, I must use the unescaped(..) version of the character since it is being submitted to the backend (where I have no control) and the output is a pdf file which uses the unescaped ® for display in a pdf.

I unescape the ® character like this:

unescape("%AE")

However...when I do view the ® in the pdf file it appears as ®, this only happens in Firefox, not in Internet Explorer.

Is there anyway of getting this to work in Firefox 2/3?

Thanks,
   Andrew

Answer 1

AFAIK, after unescaping, Mozilla returns the Unicode representation of ®, but IE not. ("%C2%AE" in hex, and %C2 means that strange character Â appearing in the PDF.) Internet Explorer and Mozilla unescapes strings in a different way. You should set an explicit character encoding, principally UTF-8.

MDC: escape and unescape Functions:

The escape and unescape functions do not work properly for non-ASCII characters and have been deprecated. In JavaScript 1.5 and later, use encodeURI, decodeURI, encodeURIComponent, and decodeURIComponent.

MSDN:

The unescape method returns a string value that contains the contents of charstring. All characters encoded with the %xx hexadecimal form are replaced by their ASCII character set equivalents.

Characters encoded in %uxxxx format (Unicode characters) are replaced with the Unicode character with hexadecimal encoding xxxx.