Tag Archives: characters

Non-Ascii charactors in my AJAX responses !?

A while ago, I co-wrote a large site with Ryan while I was working at Zipline Interactive, this site uses Mootools 0.98 as we found to be getting a lot of �������� all through the JAX requested response code.

For the life of US, we couldn’t figure out why? it’s not in the output if we called the data via a normal http request, so I looked for a fix.

  1. Upgrade the Mootools to version 1.2.2
  2. Add an enc type to the AJAX functions 
    	new Request.HTML({
		method: 'get',
		url: '/examples/ajax.php',
		data: { 'example': 'ajax-ascii' },
		encoding: 'iso-8859-1',
		onRequest: function() {
			$('calendarMainEvent').empty().removeClass('calendarClosed');
			$('calendarMainEvent').set('html', 'Loading');
		},
		onComplete: function(responseTree, responseElements, responseHTML, responseJavaScript) {
			$('calendarMainEvent').empty().set('html', responseHTML);
			$('calendarMainEvent').setProperty('class','calendarOpen');
		},
		onFailure: function() {
			$('calendarMainEvent').empty().removeClass('calendarClosed');
		}
	}).send();

  3. Specifying the charset in the PHP that is outputting the AJAX response!

    < ?php

if($_GET['ajax_request']) {

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1');
echo('
    Success');
/* More output code */

}

Matching the Character set

It didn’t occur to me right away that I need to specify the charset more than just in the <head> section of the page, but that was all it took.

Of course you want to match your PHP header, Javascript encoding and xHTML charsets all to the same with it is iso-xxx or utf-xx

SPAW WYSIWYG was showing HTML characters not HTML

I noticed when installing the SPAW Editow recently that on the Design tab in SPAW, the HTML was showing as converted HTML Symbols like &lt; and &gt; rather than < and >.

After a bit of playing, i found this hidden piece of information on the SPAW FAQ’s.


You should use getHtml() method instead of show(). It returns the code which you can store into variable and use whenever you need it.

SPAW getHTML() Rather than show()

SPAW getHTML() Rather than show()