Form POST data is transforming my input

Question

I have a question regarding the POST values I get back when I post a HTML form like this:

<form action="" method="POST">
    <input type="text" name="test">
    <input type="submit">
</form>

If I type in jöachi@æøåèÆ in the input field and do a var dump on the $_POST value, I get this:

array (size=1)
  'test' => string 'jöachi@æøå&#232;Æ' (length=17)

In the result you can see that the è sign have been replaced with the ISO Latin-1 code è

How can I make it so that it doesn't do that?

The encoding in my page is ISO-8859-10, and I tried to change it to be UTF-8, but with no luck.

I also thought it might be something to do with magic_quotes in my apache, but that isn't enabled.

Any help appreciated

Try to use `html_entity_decode` http://php.net/manual/en/function.html-entity-decode.php — Nir Alfasi, Sep 18 '13 at 07:48
I did, but it didn't help. That will decode HTML spesial chars like æ and not the ISO Latin-1 codes :( — Joachims, Sep 18 '13 at 07:52
I'd rather recheck server encoding settings and force it to utf-8. If not, you could try http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-convert-encoding.php — Akshaya Shanbhogue, Sep 18 '13 at 08:02
Possible duplicate: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9587751/decoding-numeric-html-entities-via-php — Jon, Sep 18 '13 at 08:12
@alfasin htmlspecialchars_decode didn't work either. Result was: jöachi@æøåèÆ — Joachims, Sep 18 '13 at 08:48
@Akshay I don't have access to the servers sadly and I have tried mb_convert_encoding but with no luck — Joachims, Sep 18 '13 at 08:50
@Jon Yeah I tried that aswell but with no luck. The result for that was: jöachi@æøåÃĻÆ — Joachims, Sep 18 '13 at 08:50
I don't know why it doesn't work for you, sounds like UTF-8 is the right approach: http://stackoverflow.com/a/15792364/1057429 — Nir Alfasi, Sep 18 '13 at 14:17

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 24 '13 at 15:48

1

Using UTF-8 would be bad in any case for you? If not, try explicitly saying that you are using UTF-8 with meta:

<meta charset="utf-8" />

It will probably solve your problem.

In all my web applications I use UTF-8 and I always make sure all the communications are made in that way, even all the database collations.

Anyway, try to force your form to submit in UTF-8 everytime too.

<form action="" method="POST" accept-charset="UTF-8">

answered Sep 24 '13 at 15:48

Ivo Pereira

if you set `ini_set('default_charset', 'UTF-8')` at the top of the script, then you can omit `` – Yang Sep 24 '13 at 15:54

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 09 '13 at 10:22

This is character set issue.

use this line before </head> tag.

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

If you are saving data in MySql then first change mysql collation to UTF-8 general ci

and add these two line where you are saving the data.

mysql_query( "SET NAMES 'utf8'" );
mysql_query( "SET CHARACTER_SET 'utf8'" );

2 Answers2