Setting the character encoding in form submit for Internet Explorer

Juha_1431 0
Viewed 141538

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.

<form accept-charset="ISO-8859-1">
  ...
</form>

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.

iso-8859-1 internet-explorer encoding forms html
11 Answers

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.

Juha_14310

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.

Ambush_Commander_238450

For Russian symbols 'windows-1251'

<form action="yourProcessPage.php" method="POST" accept-charset="utf-8">
<input name="string" value="string" />
...
</form>

When simply convert string to cp1251

$string = $_POST['string'];
$string = mb_convert_encoding($string, "CP1251", "UTF-8");
user_13209320

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.

PhiLho_154590

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.

warpr_77000

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...

pdc_89250 
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
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