PHP not receveing characters with accents from Ajax

Question

I made a script in Ajax that simply recovers data from MySQL and gives it back to PHP when a select option is changed:

$country = $_POST['country'];
$sql = "SELECT id,name FROM regions WHERE idcountry='$country' ORDER BY name ASC";
$result = mysqli_query($connexion->db, $sql);
$count_row = $result->num_rows;

$regions_arr = array();

while( $row = mysqli_fetch_array($result) ){
    $idregion = $row['id'];
    $nameregion = htmlentities($row['name']);

    $regions_arr[] = array("id" => $idregion, "name" => $nameregion);
}
// encoding array to json format
echo json_encode($regions_arr);

And in my PHP page I have this script:

<script>
$(document).ready(function(){
$("#sel_country").change(function(){
    var countryid = $(this).val();

    $.ajax({
        url: '/include/ajax/getRegions.php',
        type: 'POST',
        data: {country:countryid},
        dataType: 'json',
        success:function(response){

            var len = response.length;

            $("#sel_region").empty();
            for( var i = 0; i<len; i++){
                var id = response[i]['id'];
                var name = response[i]['name'];

                $("#sel_region").append("<option value='"+id+"'>"+name+"</option>");

            }
        }
    });
});
});
</script>

Everything works at is has to, except for some of the names recovered that have special characters, for instance "Genève" or "Zürich". Those values are not showed at all, my option has the correct value for the id but it looks empty in the name.

I searched and I tried with uriencode but it doesn't seem to change, any idea how to fix this? Thank you!

UPDATE AND SOLUTION

I solved this by changing my tables to utf8m64 in this way (for each table):

ALTER TABLE
`table_name`
CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4
COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Then in my script Ajax I added this:

mysqli_set_charset($link, 'utf8mb4');

And then it finally works :)

your sql code is vulnerable to injection attacks. You should use parameterised queries and prepared statements to protect your data from attacks which could easily steal, corrupt or delete your data. See http://bobby-tables.com/ for an intro to the topic and also some examples of using parameterised queries, including for PHP — ADyson, Jul 26 '17 at 11:04
as to the specific issue at hand. What encoding does your database, and your page use? If not utf-8 in both cases, then you should. You can also try setting the content-type header in your response to use `'application/json; charset=utf-8'`. One or more of those should hopefully resolve the issue. — ADyson, Jul 26 '17 at 11:07
my enconding in the database is latin1_swedish_ci and in my page is utf8. I tried with script type="application/json" but then it doesn't work — Ame, Jul 26 '17 at 11:11
Not sure what you mean by "script type". I'm referring to the _response_ header you can set in your PHP code. Also I didn't say to set it to "application/json". Read more carefully. — ADyson, Jul 26 '17 at 11:14

score -2 · Answer 1 · edited Jul 26 '17 at 11:32

-2

Try like this

$.ajax({
  url: "mydomain.com/url",
  type: "POST",
  dataType: "xml/html/script/json", // expected format for response
  contentType: "application/json"
});

edited Jul 26 '17 at 11:32

ADyson

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answered Jul 26 '17 at 11:09

Anand Pandey

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when I add contentType: "application/json" it stops working – Ame Jul 26 '17 at 11:13
2

content-type in the ajax call settings sets the format of the data being _sent_. The question is about the data being _received_. – ADyson Jul 26 '17 at 11:13
Ok Adyson. gotcha – Anand Pandey Jul 26 '17 at 11:16

PHP not receveing characters with accents from Ajax

1 Answers1