Posted by still me on 10/15/07 03:08

I am working with a simple Paypal shopping cart and having an issue
with an odd character. The cart is called from a web page (what Paypal
normally expects) with a FORM/SUBMIT. I am also calling it via POST
from a cgi program that mimics the FORM submit and just passes the
HTTP headers and content back as received. Tests are from MSIE and
Firefox on Windows XP.

It all works fine, the pages return identically, with one little
glitch. In the case of the call from the CGI program, I see a few
funky  characters displayed on screen. The code that is causing them
is easy to find in the source:

<tr class="summary">
<td> </td>
<td> </td>

Here's the strange part: the exact same characters appear in the
source that returns from the regular FORM/SUBMIT, yet the characters
don't appear in either browser with the FORM/POST. They only appear in
the CGI call. I've verified that the returned page is identical, with
identical source code. HTTP Headers are the same. The funky characters
are the same at the hex level. Both pages use style files, but the
references are all absolute from the server on down and I think they
should resolve the same. Both pages contain both an HTTP content type
header and a META header that specify UTF8, as follows:
HTTP:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
HTML:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

Any thoughts? Is this a character set issue? I could change the header
before I issue the page from the CGI of there is a character set that
would work better.

Thanks for any insight,

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