German characters not correct in output webformAddison Phillips [wM] wrote: > When you do a form submit (POST or GET of data to the server), > the browser encodes the characters being sent using the character > encoding that the page uses.
Not necessarily: the HTML form can specify the encoding that the browser should use when submitting the form data to the server. Most problems come when this is not explicitly indicated as an attribute of the form, so that browsers determine a default encoding to use: normally this should be the same as the current encoding of the HTML page. But some other browsers simply use a ISO-8859-1 default, or a UTF-8 default. Solution: specify explicitly the encoding to use as an attribute of the HTML form, and make sure it is the same as the HTML page. Then be ready to accept that encoding in your server. Note that browsers will normally specify the encoding with which the form data was submitted. Look at HTTP headers that come along with the POST request. Note also that if your form uses the "GET" method with URL-encoding, it is strongly recommanded that you encode the form data using the same encoding recommanded for URLs (UTF-8) before URL-encoding is applied (transformation of non-ASCII characters into sequences of %xx). This means that your HTML form page will also need to be encoded with UTF-8. If your form page uses ISO-8859-1, then specify explicitly the ISO-8859-1 encoding as the one to use for submitting forms, as an explicit attribute of your <form> element. But then visitors won't be able to send other characters than ISO-8859-1 in their form data, whever the form method is GET with URL-encoding, or POST in standard form-data format.
