Forms, encoding, mysql question

  • I have a question about how WP processes forms. I am trying to build a little MySQL database that can be populated by an online form for a side project. It is for books. I need to enter titles in 2 languages. Thus I set it up for UTF-8 just like my WordPress install. Unfortunately it only seems to render the characters properly when I have my browser to to UTF-8 when I type in the data, and also UTF-8 when I try to read the output on the webpage. My WordPress install works fine with both languages, and no need to switch the encoding in the browser. I am a n00b when it comes to the specifics of charset encoding. Can anyone point me to a source on how to do this?

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
  • Thread Starter younghusband

    (@younghusband)

    Nothing?

    I am no coder by any means… but what is the encoding on the page where your online form collects the data? If it s NOT utf-8, then what do you expect?

    EDIT. This one is also a good read: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-connection.html

    Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)

    (@otto42)

    www.remarpro.com Admin

    Add this to your webpage’s HEAD section:

    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

    (That should all be on one line, no breaks)

    Alternatively, configure your webserver to send a UTF-8 content type in the http headers.

    Thread Starter younghusband

    (@younghusband)

    The following is the head of the input page:

    <head>
    <title>Media Admin Panel</title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
    </head>

    Thread Starter younghusband

    (@younghusband)

    As for the server, WP is installed on the same server. In fact, the Media DB table I put together is in the same DB as WP. I have no problem typing Japanese and English on WP. There must be some code for passing characters that I am not putting into my form…

    Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)

    (@otto42)

    www.remarpro.com Admin

    If you don’t force the encoding, and in Firefox right click and go to “View Page Info”, what does the encoding show up as?

    Thread Starter younghusband

    (@younghusband)

    I commented out the encoding on all pages (admin, japanese output and english output) and then did what you said in Firefox and it told me: ISO-8859-1

    Something I should mention, this is written in perl, not PHP. I don’t know if that has an effect on the outcome. I was hoping it was just encoding.

    EDIT: Also, looking up the db on phpMyAdmin the MySQL charset is UTF-8 and MySQL connection collation is utf8_unicode_ci

    I guess Otto didn’t suggest to comment out the charset metatag, but to look at the page without setting your browser to utf-8 and see what is the encoding that it gets automatically…

    Thread Starter younghusband

    (@younghusband)

    Oh! Okay, well I tried that and got the same thing: ISO-8859-1

    So the meta tag isn’t forcing the charset to actually change… what to do?

    Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)

    (@otto42)

    www.remarpro.com Admin

    A few things:
    a) The meta tag needs to be closed. So either change the end to /> or add a </meta> after it. Always close all tags.
    b) UTF-8 should be capitalized. iso-8859-1 should not.
    c) If you are writing this as a script, just set the Content-Type header directly. It should be “text/html; charset=UTF-8”. In PHP, I would do this with:
    header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");
    before any output was made, so probably right at the top of the script. I do not know what the Perl equivalent of this would be.

    Thread Starter younghusband

    (@younghusband)

    Well, I closed the tag but in FF the encoding still comes up as ISO-8859-1. (in the META section is states UTF-8…)

    Still no go though…

    I found out how to set the charset in perl:

    print "Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8nn";

    I will have to consult a perl pro to get this into the script and see if that works.

    Thanks for your help Otto and Moshu.

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
  • The topic ‘Forms, encoding, mysql question’ is closed to new replies.