My company is about to create a site that will gather submissions from a very internationl audience. Each visitor will enter several paragraphs of text.

I'm worried because I don't really know anything about practical character encoding issues. I'd really like all data submitted by users to be utf-8. But can I enforce this? It seems that the accept-charset attribute of the form tag is not widely honoured.

I found a decent overview of the traps at http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/form-i18n.html. I particularly like the 'buzzword' idea, where a string in a hidden field is used to guess what encoding the form was sent it.

So - is there a standard solution to this problem? or several?

thanks, qq

In reply to Text encoding in web form entries by qq

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.