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Setting the character encoding in form submit for Internet Explorer

Asked 2008-09-30T15:21:38.360
62

I have a page that contains a form. This page is served with content type text/html;charset=utf-8. I need to submit this form to server using ISO-8859-1 character encoding. Is this possible with Internet Explorer?

Setting accept-charset attribute to form element, like this, works for Firefox, Opera etc. but not for IE.

<form accept-charset="ISO-8859-1">
  ...
</form>

Edit: This form is created by server A and will be submitted to server B. I have no control over server B.

If I set server A to serve content with charset ISO-8859-1 everything works, but I am looking a way to make this work without changes to server A's encoding. I have another question about setting the encoding in server A.

html internet-explorer forms encoding iso-8859-1
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2 Answers

35

There is a simple hack to this:

Insert a hidden input field in the form with an entity which only occur in the character set the server your posting (or doing a GET) to accepts.

Example: If the form is located on a server serving ISO-8859-1 and the form will post to a server expecting UTF-8 insert something like this in the form:

<input name="iehack" type="hidden" value="&#9760;" />

IE will then "detect" that the form contains a UTF-8 character and use UTF-8 when you POST or GET. Strange, but it does work.

answered 2009-09-02T12:42:03.063
1

Just got the same problem and I have a relatively simple solution that does not require any change in the page character encoding(wich is a pain in the ass).

For example, your site is in utf-8 and you want to post a form to a site in iso-8859-1. Just change the action of the post to a page on your site that will convert the posted values from utf-8 to iso-8859-1.

this could be done easily in php with something like this:

<?php
$params = array();
foreach($_POST as $key=>$value) {
    $params[] = $key."=".rawurlencode(utf8_decode($value));
}
$params = implode("&",$params);

//then you redirect to the final page in iso-8859-1
?>
answered 2010-07-23T20:48:22.533

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