This happens due to various factors. AOLserver didn't historically do anything about character sets, but Tcl 8.1 (and later) assumes that strings in memory are in UTF-8 and performs conversions at its boundaries. AOLserver puts stuff in Tcl's memory without doing that conversion.
And HTTP and HTML are weak when it comes to specifying character sets. When you submit a form using the GET method, it has to put the form data in the URL. But what encoding should it use? As I recall, there's no way for the server to ask the client to use a specific charset, and no way for the client to tell the server what it used. I wrote a document about this a while back when I tried to make it all work at ArsDigita: <http://dqd.com/~mayoff/encoding-doc.html>. However, the code examples in that document apply to the ArsDigita versions of AOLserver (the last of which is 3.3+ad13). I hacked those versions to do character set translations. Probably none of the example code will work in the standard versions of AOLserver. You can probably find some other documents about these problems on arsdigita.com or elsewhere. I think Henry Minsky wrote a couple of things about it. +---------- On May 9, atfrost said: > I posted a few days ago regarding some problems I was having using > data received by AOLServer via form submission in certain charsets.
