We're using this script -- http://jsfiddle.net/6t74T/4/ -- which we learned about in this terrific forum. It uses JQuery autocomplete. The script is working great for our purposes except for diacritics (accented characters). There are a lot of posts in the forum about accented characters, utf-8, etc., but this one is just a little different b/c of how we store our data. Here's an example that illustrates our problem.
If someone adds a person's name to our "people" table, we check the inputted string for accented characters. If there are any we change them to html entities. So "Añosa" gets changed to "Añosa". We don't save the data with the accented character because a couple of other processes in our system get seriously kludged up by diacritics. When you view a page that includes this data, it displays correctly because it's simply html. We use PHP and MySQL. Our MySQL tables are set to UTF-8, we use <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> in the header of all pages and "accept-charset="UTF-8"" in our form tags. All good.
But, when a name with accented characters displays in an autocomplete list, it appears with the html entities. Instead of seeing "Añosa" in the list which is what we want, we see "Añosa". We have tried doing a str_replace on html entities eg., str_replace("Añosa", "Añosa", $string), but this results in one of those black diamond with a question mark symbols instead of the accented character. Tried html_entity_decode - also doesn't work. What do we have to do to get this to appear in its accented form in the autocomplete list?
Appreciate any insight, ideas, assistance! Thanks!