JQuery AJAX is not sending UTF-8 to my server, only in IE

Question

I am sending UTF-8, japanese text, to my server. It works in Firefox. My access.log and headers are:

/ajax/?q=%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD%97 Accept-Charset  ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Content-Type    application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8 

Howeer, in IE8, my access.log says:

/ajax/?q=?? 

For some reason, IE8 is turning my AJAX call into question marks. Why!? I added the scriptCharset and ContentType according to some tutorials, but still no luck.

And this is my code:

$.ajax({     method:"get",     url:"/ajax/",     scriptCharset: "utf-8" ,     contentType: "application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8",     data:"q="+query ...,     ...     }) 

Answer 1

Try encoding the query parameter with encodeURIComponent()

data:"q="+encodeURIComponent( query ) 

as bobince very correctly noted in his comment, if you use the object notation to pass parameters to the ajax method it will handle the encoding itself..

so

data:{ q : query } 

will make jQuery handle the encoding ..

Answer 2

I'we read this post hoping it would solve the problem I had came across and that had to do with utf8 conversions.

In my case it turned out that the server engine (node.js) calculating the Content-length of the data with the data considered to be raw and not utf8, thus two character extended chars in uft8 was calculated as if they where one char resulting in the server sending one character too little.

See what I did to solve it here: Not well formed Json when sending to CouchDB