Posted by Markus on 07/17/07 17:01

Matthew White schrieb:
> Hello,
> I have a website that is supposed to grab a French word, and return the
> English translation. The front-end has an AJAX script, that dynamically
> POST's the value to the backend:
>
> function post() {
> var string = document.getElementById("string").value;
> var poststr = "string=" + encodeURI( string );
> makePOSTRequest('dict.eng.php', poststr);
> }
>
> Then the backend takes the script, and queries a database for 30 words
> most like that word:
>
> $query = "SELECT * FROM dictionary WHERE fr like ('" . $string . "%')
> ORDER BY fr LIMIT 30";
> $query = mysql_query($query);
>
> If I enter in a word like "bonjour", the script returns the words that
> are most like bonjour. A word with a special character, like
> "français", will return no values, even though it is in the dictionary.
> The page is in UTF-8, and the database, tables, and fields are all
> utf8_bin. Can anyone please point me in the right direction?

Your Ajax function does encodeURI( string ) - do you decode it somewhere
before you do the database query? You can check this with var_dump($string).

Anyway, as you do a POST request, I would actually try to go without
urlencoding the string (this is needed with the GET method).
Javascript's encodeURI()/decodeURI() and PHP's urlencode()/urldecode()
may have different behaviours. I'd rather try to have your function send
the data as UTF-8. In a normal form, this would be done with the
accept-charset="UTF-8" attribute in the form tag; I don't know wether
this also works when sending data with your method.

HTH
Markus

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