Passing extended chars

[Sean O'Dwyer]

I sometimes need to find a set of records via PHP/SQL with
non-English/extended characters fed to the query via a hyperlink.

For example, I have a navigation link on a site that tries to pass the
phrase "Gesundheit und Schönheit" via http with the extended character
(ö) correctly encoded as an HTML entity (ö)

http://www.domain.com/page.php?indus=Gesundheit%20und%20Schönheit

However "Gesundheit und Schönheit" is not passed to my variable, only
"Gesundheit und Sch". I reckon the ampersand is causing trouble.

If correctly encoding extend chars as html entities isn't working for
what I want, how can I encode them for storage in XHTML or otherwise get
the result I want?

TIA,

Sean

[Daniel Tryba]

Re: Passing extended chars

Sean O'Dwyer <nospam@spamfre e.dud> wrote:[color=blue]
> phrase "Gesundheit und Sch?nheit" via http with the extended character
> (?) correctly encoded as an HTML entity (&ouml;)
>
> http://www.domain.com/page.php?indus...Sch&ouml;nheit[/color]
[snip][color=blue]
> If correctly encoding extend chars as html entities isn't working for
> what I want, how can I encode them for storage in XHTML or otherwise get
> the result I want?[/color]

You are creating an _URL_ so if you want/need encode a tring for passing
in the _URL_ you need to _URL encode_ it:

http://php.net/rawurlencoda

and

http://php.net/urlencode

BTW read the note under exmaple 1 of last url.

[John Dunlop]

Re: Passing extended chars

Sean O'Dwyer wrote:
[color=blue]
> http://www.domain.com/page.php?indus...Sch&ouml;nheit[/color]

(Is that an example? If so, please follow RFC2606 and use
reserved domain names which won't conflict with current or
future ones; e.g., <http://host.invalid/>.)

URIs are made up of only a subset of US-ASCII, so after the
entity &ouml; is replaced, that isn't a URI. You can
convert that IRI to a URI by converting 'ö' (U+00F6) to its
UTF-8 encoding and then percent-encode each octet. Thus

http://www.domain.com/page.php?indus=Gesundheit%20und%20Sch%C3%B6nheit

I don't know what happens in the wild, but that's the
ratified way of encoding characters that are not allowed in
URIs. See RFC3987 sec. 3.1.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3987.txt

Here's how the expert Martin Dürst set up his URI:

http://www.w3.org/People/D%C3%BCrst/URI.html

[color=blue]
> However "Gesundheit und Schönheit" is not passed to my variable, only
> "Gesundheit und Sch". I reckon the ampersand is causing trouble.[/color]

&ouml; is simply a way to represent the character LATIN
SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS in HTML. The trouble is that
that character is not allowed unencoded in URIs.

--
Jock