Setting the character encoding in form submit for Internet Explorer

Question

There is a simple hack to this:

Insert a hidden input field in the form with an entity which only occur in the character set the server your posting (or doing a GET) to accepts.

Example: If the form is located on a server serving ISO-8859-1 and the form will post to a server expecting UTF-8 insert something like this in the form:

<input name="iehack" type="hidden" value="&#9760;" />

IE will then "detect" that the form contains a UTF-8 character and use UTF-8 when you POST or GET. Strange, but it does work.

With decent browsers:

<form accept-charset="ISO-8859-1" .... >

With IE (any):

document.charset = 'ISO-8859-1'; // do this before submitting your non-utf8 <form>!

It seems that this can't be done, not at least with current versions of IE (6 and 7).

IE supports form attribute accept-charset, but only if its value is 'utf-8'.

The solution is to modify server A to produce encoding 'ISO-8859-1' for page that contains the form.

I've got the same problem here. I have an UTF-8 Page an need to post to an ISO-8859-1 server.

Looks like IE can't handle ISO-8859-1. But it can handle ISO-8859-15.

<form accept-charset="ISO-8859-15">
  ...
</form>

So this worked for me, since ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15 are almost the same.

If you have any access to the server at all, convert its processing to UTF-8. The art of submitting non-UTF-8 forms is a long and sorry story; this document about forms and i18n may be of interest. I understand you do not seem to care about international support; you can always convert the UTF-8 data to html entities to make sure it stays Latin-1.

Just got the same problem and I have a relatively simple solution that does not require any change in the page character encoding(wich is a pain in the ass).

For example, your site is in utf-8 and you want to post a form to a site in iso-8859-1. Just change the action of the post to a page on your site that will convert the posted values from utf-8 to iso-8859-1.

this could be done easily in php with something like this:

<?php
$params = array();
foreach($_POST as $key=>$value) {
    $params[] = $key."=".rawurlencode(utf8_decode($value));
}
$params = implode("&",$params);

//then you redirect to the final page in iso-8859-1
?>