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Satyam,

Re: there is something that you can do on the server side to have everything working fine.

Umm, not really. (While it can work in specific cases, it won't work in the "everything" case.)

Your servers and browsers are all W Europe and could be set to use either 8859.1 or utf-8. You don't know which and either will work (as long as both the server and client match).

But if you want your server software to work with a browser in the Japan locale/character set, then you need to get everything right. Which is easy to do--just set the character set, explicitly, to utf-8.

Or if you want things to work and the browser is utf-8 while the server framework is 8859.1 (the original poster's situation), then you also need to set the character set explicitly.

What you can do on the server side is to change the web framework's character encoding default to be utf-8. But doing so is NOT recommended: it is framework-dependent and will not work if other clients of the framework are counting on the default being ascii or 8859.1.

The correct answer is to follow the specifications: specify the character set to be used for each request/reply. That's why correct web pages (responses) specify their character set. And why correct requests (eg datasource requests) also specify their char set.

Depending on the client's and server's character set defaults matching correctly is a mug's game. While it can work correctly, it is a "last-century solution" and tends to break in weird ways at unexpected times.

Re: plain forms: the browsers use the character encoding of the page that holds the form. Though you can explicitly set it if you want to via accept-charset
<form accept-charset="utf-8">

To see what the page's encoding is, ask the browser. Eg, in Firefox, see
Tools > Page Info: Encoding

See
http://htmlpurifier.org/docs/enduser-utf8.html and
http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/charsets
for more info.

Here's an additional idea from Stackoverflow: you should also test your app by trying some right-to-left text.

Here's the test: enter שלום ירושלים (by copying/pasting this text)

Then see if it appears correctly on output. It should look like:


Note: This YUI library forum software is implemented correctly for international characters. So if the above text does not match the above image, the problem is somewhere on your browser, os, perhaps a proxy, etc.

Thanks for your replies!

I tried to set the charset like this:

But the charset is still ISO-8859-1.
What am I doing wrong?

Lisa,

How do you know that the charset is 8859.1? Can you use the "Net" window of firefox to see what is being sent from the YUI component?

Here's a brand new post on the topic.
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/2 ... s_in_urls/

My thoughts:
1) This needs testing.
2) It's looking like the encoding used for characters in the query string may be browser dependent. -- needs to be confirmed.
3) Sending via post is starting to look pretty attractive...