Special chars getting lost in $_POST

Question

In a project we have a form with some input fields and a textarea. It is a multilangual project and if some text is translated in German the use of chars like ü and ö are very common.

In the past we never had problems saving and retrieving these from a database. We use the utf8_general_ci collation in our tables.

Today we got a strange behaviour when submitting the form. All special chars entered in the input fields seem to dissapear.
(They are even gone in $_POST['field_name'], at first we thought it had something to do with codeigniter's input class)

However, any special chars entered in the textarea ARE in the $_POSTarray...

Did anyone have this problem before?

Can you verify that your entire chain is UTF-8? (meta tags, SET NAMES etc.) — Halcyon, Sep 25 '13 at 12:35
Have you checked the collation of the individual columns in the table. Sometimes it can be set to different to the table. e.g. can you insert characters directly from a database query? If you can then that narrows it down on the input rather than the database. — Robbo_UK, Sep 25 '13 at 12:42
The individual colums all are the same collation. The meta tags get set depending on the language used at time of pageload. First time I saw this though. Not sure if it needs to be like that, but the dude who worked here before me coded that part. Should I change the meta to utf8 for each language ? — Brainfeeder, Sep 25 '13 at 13:49

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 25 '13 at 12:37

0

set meta tag to utf8 or iso-8859-1

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1"/>

answered Sep 25 '13 at 12:37

ihsan

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score -1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 25 '13 at 12:35

-1

Add header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); to the header

answered Sep 25 '13 at 12:35

Joran Den Houting

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`htmlspecialchars` is not the right function. `htmlspecialschars` should be used when _ouputting_ to HTML; not input to the database. – Halcyon Sep 25 '13 at 12:36
@FritsvanCampen I was too fast, ment to be Mysql real escape string – Joran Den Houting Sep 25 '13 at 12:37
`mysql*_real_escape_string` doesn't do anything with encoding, so yes you should use it but it doesn't solve OPs problem. – Halcyon Sep 25 '13 at 12:37
You should not use mysql extension as it's deprecated. – loler Sep 25 '13 at 12:38
1

Setting the UTF-8 Content-Type charset is just one of many encoding hints you can set. Now your answer is partial at best. – Halcyon Sep 25 '13 at 12:40

Special chars getting lost in $_POST

2 Answers2