Ajax charset encoding

[maverick5x]

Hello,

 

I am having problems developing an arabic website using PHP/MySQL and ajax. Arabic text in pages is displayed as is with no problems. but when data is posted from an html form the data are saved in the database in UTF-8 encoding. I though it was from the mysql collation thing and charsets but it wasn't. I discovered that when data is sent to the PHP script, it reads them as utf-8 strings although i did specify the charset in the ajax post request

xmlHttp.onreadystatechange=AjaxStateChanged;
xmlHttp.open("POST",url,true);
xmlHttp.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=Windows-1256");
xmlHttp.send(postdata);

 

I knew that by replacing html that should be displayed as a response to my page by the sql statement that contains the values posted and they appear as some wierd characters. So we can tell it's not the mysql, nor ajax(it shows correct encoding in "alert" before posting).

 

I think i can say it's in the http connection. Is there a solution to this one? i cannot convert to utf-8 because i have a huge database with arabic (windows-1256) data on it.

 

Hope someone has the answer

 

best regards,

Rakan

 

[zohab]

try following

 

 

for utf8
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf8\n");
for Windows-1256
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=Windows-1256\n");

 

with the help of above it will set charset to Windows-1256 for current page data display.

 

use in the top of the page

 

<?php 

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=Windows-1256\n");

?>

[haku]

If your javascript is in an external file, you can also try setting a charset for that file (I have had similar problems working with Japanese):

 

<script type="text/javascript" src="javascript/user_details.js" charset="EUC-JP"></script>

 

note: replace 'EUC-JP' with the charset of your choice. That just happens to be the one I use.