Setting the character encoding in form submit for Internet Explorer

Question

I have a page that contains a form  This page is served with content type text html charset utf-8  I need to submit this form to server using ISO-8859-1 character encoding  Is this possible with Internet Explorer   Setting accept-charset attribute to form element  like this  works for Firefox  Opera etc  but not for IE    lt form accept-charset  ISO-8859-1  gt         lt  form gt    Edit  This form is created by server A and will be submitted to server B  I have no control over server B   If I set server A to serve content with charset ISO-8859-1 everything works  but I am looking a way to make this work without changes to server A s encoding  I have another question about setting the encoding in server A

User · Answer

With decent browsers    lt form accept-charset  ISO-8859-1        gt    With IE  any    document charset    ISO-8859-1      do this before submitting your non-utf8  lt form gt

User · Answer

If you have any access to the server at all  convert its processing to UTF-8  The art of submitting non-UTF-8 forms is a long and sorry story  this document about forms and i18n may be of interest  I understand you do not seem to care about international support  you can always convert the UTF-8 data to html entities to make sure it stays Latin-1

User · Answer

I ve got the same problem here  I have an UTF-8 Page an need to post to an ISO-8859-1 server   Looks like IE can t handle ISO-8859-1  But it can handle ISO-8859-15    lt form accept-charset  ISO-8859-15  gt         lt  form gt    So this worked for me  since ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15 are almost the same

User · Answer

There is a simple hack to this   Insert a hidden input field in the form with an entity which only occur in the character set the server your posting  or doing a GET  to accepts   Example  If the form is located on a server serving ISO-8859-1 and the form will post to a server expecting UTF-8 insert something like this in the form    lt input name  iehack  type  hidden  value   amp  9760     gt    IE will then  detect  that the form contains a UTF-8 character and use UTF-8 when you POST or GET  Strange  but it does work

User · Answer

I seem to remember that Internet Explorer gets confused if the accept-charset encoding doesn t match the encoding specified in the content-type header   In your example  you claim the document is sent as UTF-8  but want form submits in ISO-8859-1   Try matching those and see if that solves your problem

User · Answer

It seems that this can t be done  not at least with current versions of IE  6 and 7    IE supports form attribute accept-charset  but only if its value is  utf-8     The solution is to modify server A to produce encoding  ISO-8859-1  for page that contains the form

User · Answer

For Russian symbols  windows-1251    lt form action  yourProcessPage php  method  POST  accept-charset  utf-8  gt   lt input name  string  value  string    gt       lt  form gt    When simply convert string to cp1251   string     POST  string     string   mb convert encoding  string   CP1251    UTF-8

User · Answer

It seems that this can t be done  not at least with current versions of IE  6 and 7    IE supports form attribute accept-charset  but only if its value is  utf-8     The solution is to modify server A to produce encoding  ISO-8859-1  for page that contains the form

User · Answer

Just got the same problem and I have a relatively simple solution that does not require any change in the page character encoding wich is a pain in the ass    For example  your site is in utf-8 and you want to post a form to a site in iso-8859-1  Just change the action of the post to a page on your site that will convert the posted values from utf-8 to iso-8859-1   this could be done easily in php with something like this    lt  php  params   array    foreach   POST as  key  gt  value         params      key     rawurlencode utf8 decode  value       params   implode   amp    params      then you redirect to the final page in iso-8859-1   gt

User · Answer

lt meta http-equiv  Content-Type  content  text html  charset iso-8859-1  gt

User · Answer

I am pretty sure it won t be possible with older versions of IE  Before the accept-charset attribute was devised  there was no way for form elements to specify which character encoding they accepted  and the best that browsers could do is assume the encoding of the page the form is in will do   It is a bit sad that you need to know which encoding was used -- nowadays we would expect our web frameworks to take care of such details invisibly and expose the text data to the application as Unicode strings  already decoded

User · Answer

Looks like Microsoft knows accept-charset  but their doc doesn t tell for which version it starts to work    You don t tell either in which versions of browser you tested it

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