special chars - url

[Rommeo]

I have members from different countries who uses different languages,

and I want to let my members to search by using url;

 

for example

mysite.com/phpuser

- has no problem

mysite.com/kölnn

- problem : user becomes "k%F6lnn" and script can not find the user.

 

What s the easyway to solve this ?

htaccess ? a function ? anything else ?

 

 

[analog]

It's being encoded for the URL. You can use urldecode to convert it back.

[Rommeo]

I have tried it, it did not work.

it still says user "k%F6lnn" could not found.

[analog]

urldecode should be converting it back. Can you post the bit of code that is not working.

[Rommeo]

mysite.com/index.php?word=köln
enter
echo urldecode($_GET['word']);
echo $_GET['word'];

output :

k�ln

k�ln

[analog]

Is it outputting the question mark � or %F6?

 

If its the question mark then it has been decoded (well looking at it it didn't need it) and it is most likely because you to correct charset.

 

Try using this:

<?php
function to_utf8( $string ) { 
// From http://w3.org/International/questions/qa-forms-utf-8.html 
     if ( preg_match('%^(?: 
       [\x09\x0A\x0D\x20-\x7E]            # ASCII 
     | [\xC2-\xDF][\x80-\xBF]             # non-overlong 2-byte 
     | \xE0[\xA0-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]         # excluding overlongs 
     | [\xE1-\xEC\xEE\xEF][\x80-\xBF]{2}  # straight 3-byte 
     | \xED[\x80-\x9F][\x80-\xBF]         # excluding surrogates 
     | \xF0[\x90-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]{2}      # planes 1-3 
     | [\xF1-\xF3][\x80-\xBF]{3}          # planes 4-15 
     | \xF4[\x80-\x8F][\x80-\xBF]{2}      # plane 16 
)*$%xs', $string) ) { 
         return $string; 
     } else { 
         return iconv( 'CP1252', 'UTF-8', $string); 
     } 
}

echo  to_utf8($_GET['word']);
?>

From http://php.net/manual/en/function.urldecode.php first comment.

[Rommeo]

Yes

That function has kinda solved my problem.

But there is another thing now,

 

when I enter

mysite.com/try.php?word=şüra

 

it gives me " þüra "

what can cause it ?

[analog]

Most likely it's the web browser (works in FF4, IE9 but not Opera). The only characters guaranteed to work in a URL are ASCII after that things can go strange.

 

You would need to urlencode it before putting it in the URL either by using PHP or you can do it with a simple HTML form for people to enter and the browser will encode it.

 

<?php
echo '<a href="?word=' . urlencode('şüra') . '">şüra</a>';
?>

<form action="" method="get">
<input type="text" name="word" value="şüra" />
<input type="submit" value="Lookup user" />
</form>

[Rommeo]

Thank you so much