jQuery.AJAX发送给PHP时出现损坏的字符（UTF-8和ISO-8859不兼容）

Question

I have a javascript/PHP script that does the following:

Uses javascript to find text on a web-page.
Transmits the text using jQuery AJAX to a PHP page.
The PHP stores the text in a MySQL database. 

The trouble is, when I look at what has been stored in the database, some non-ASCII characters are corrupted.

I have simplified the problem and printed out the character codes of each letter to investigate what is going on.

For example: send over a single character, the pound sterling symbol. When I check in PHP, what is being received is characters 0xC2 followed by 0xA3 (capital A circumflex follwed by pound sterling). Ie getting a spurious extra character  before the £).

I've looked at similar problems which suggested setting the jQuery.ajax contentType etc, but none of this made sense to me.

Thanks

Answer 1

Finally got this to work.

The problem seems to be that the jQuery.ajax transmits data to the server using UTF-8 but the PHP expects iso-8859-1.

Solution: in PHP convert UTF-8 to ISO using the utf8_decode function, e.g.

$incomming = utf8_decode($_REQUEST('incomming'));

And when you send data back for the ajax return handler, use utf8_encode() to convert back to UTF-8.

Other things that seem to work include using the javascript escape() function on the data prior to transmission to the server and then un-escape the data in PHP with URLdecode().

Other things I tried but couldn't get to work:

I tried to make ajax transmit in iso-8859-1 so it would be compatible with the PHP: In the jquery.ajax settings: contentType: "application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=iso-8859-1". Seemed to have no effect.

I tried to make PHP use UTF-8: header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'). Again it didnt work.