UTF-8 data received by php isn't decoded - php

I'm having some troubles with my $_POST/$_REQUEST datas, they appear to be utf8_encoded still.
I am sending conventional ajax post requests, in these conditions:
oXhr.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8");
js file saved under utf8-nobom format
meta-tags in html <header> tag setup
php files saved under utf-8-nobom format as well
encodeURIComponent is used but I tried without and it gives the same result
Ok, so everything is fine: the database is also in utf8, and receives it this way, pages show well.
But when I'm receiving the character "º" for example (through $_REQUEST or $_POST), its binary represention is 11000010 10111010, while "º" hardcoded in php (utf8...) binary representation is 10111010 only.
wtf? I just don't know whether it is a good thing or not... for instance if I use "#º#" as a delimiter of the explode php function, it won't get detected and this is actually the problem which lead me here.
Any help will be as usual greatly appreciated, thank you so much for your time.
Best rgds.
EDIT1: checking against mb_check_encoding
if (mb_check_encoding($_REQUEST[$i], 'UTF-8')) {
raise("$_REQUEST is encoded properly in utf8 at index " . $i);
} else {
raise(false);
}
The encoding got confirmed, I had the message raised up properly.

Single byte utf-8 characters do not have bit 7(the eight bit) set so 10111010 is not utf-8, your file is probably encoded in ISO-8859-1.

Related

Sending percent encoding as part of data

I have a site where anyone can leave comments.
By leaving a comment browser makes an ajax request to PHP script, sending encodeURIComponent-ed data to PHP script.
Earlier, in the PHP script, I added
$data = str_replace("\n","\\n",str_replace("\"","\\\"",$_POST["text"]));
Now I’ve been testing by inputting random stuff and found an exploit: if to input %00, it will be added to my comments file as null-terminator and corrupts my data. Also, other percent-encoded value will be decoded.
I am sending data as a regular application/x-www-form-urlencoded.
How to fix that?
So, the solution I’ve made so far is:
$_POST["text"] = str_replace("\"","\\\"",$_POST["text"]);
for($i=0;$i<=40;$i++)
if(chr($i)!="\n"&&chr($i)!="\r"&&chr($i)!=" "&&chr($i)!="("&&chr($i)!="&"&&chr($i)!="!"&&chr($i)!="\""&&chr($i)!="'")
$_POST["text"] = str_replace(chr($i),"",$_POST["text"]);
$_POST["text"] = str_replace("\\","",$_POST["text"]);
It just removes all special and potentially malware non-readable characters with some exceptions (newlines, ampersands etc.).
The only issue of this solution is that it removes backslash (but successfully writes data).

encoding issues in drupal when importing from wordpress

I am currently moving blog posts from wordpress to drupal. however after moving it
some of the text is not being displayed correctly.
wordpress is displaying :
When it hasn’t (html code is <h2>When it hasn’t</h2>)
Drupal is displaying :
When it hasn’t (html code is <h2>When it hasn’t</h2>)
In the wordpress and drupal db the value is correct. The source is the same.
<h2>When it hasn’t</h2>
I did a search and found many options. None of them helped.
Below are the ones I have done and checked.
1) I double checked that utf-8 is the character encoing in drupal and wp.
I also made a simple test.php file to check nothing else was coming in the way
and it still did not display correctly.
2) I made sure when we take a mysqldump and upload to drupal utf-8
is used.
3) I also made sure the .php file is in utf-8 when saved.
4) I changed the encoding type in chrome for every option available and nothing
displayed it correctly.
5) I also used php functions to recode it but they did not work.
$value2="<h2>When it hasn’t</h2>";
$out = recode_string('..utf-8', $value2);
//output - When it hasnt
$out2= mb_convert_encoding($value2,'UTF-8', "UTF-8");
// output - When it hasn’t
$out3= #iconv('UTF-8', 'utf-8', $value2);
// output - When it hasn’t
I have ran out of options now and I am stuck. Please help
You say the text in both databases is correct, but actually this doesn't mean too much: to viewing the content of a record you must use some client, and quite a few transformations may happen depending on how the text is rendered so you can read it.
So only two things matters:
the encoding of the column
the encoding of the HTML page returned by Drupal
Since your page outputs ’ (in CP1252 is xE2x80x99) for ’ (Unicode U+2019, UTF-8 is 0xE28099) I guess the column is indeed UTF-8, however there's someone between the database and the browser who thinks the text is CP1252. This is what you have to check:
If using MySQL, the connection encoding must be UTF-8 so that what you have in your PHP script is UTF-8 text. You can use SET NAMES 'UTF-8'. Note that if you don't need the Unicode set, you can even use CP1252: the only important thing is that you know the encoding, since PHP strings are just byte arrays.
Explicitely define the response encoding in the HTTP Content-Type header. I mean, configure Drupal to call header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
If the HTTP response encoding is different than the one used for the text retrieved from the db, transcode the query result accordingly

Ajax autocompletion lost in character encoding

The scheme is a text input field in a html form to be autocompleted using jQuery.autocomplete and getting the appropriate server response (e;g. a city name json list). The whole package works well... except that the client does not get data returned from the server when typing accented characters (éèà..). Same as many, it looks like I'm facing a char encoding issue but can not manage to figure out where and how to solve it despite many tries (iconv, utf8_encode, urldecode...) and readings like this one for example.
Therefore I'd need some help/hints to understand where to act (before prototyping jQuery autocomplete code ... ?)
EDIT: might be also a jQuery accent folding issue, I'll try also that way.
Configuration:
server: Apache2.2 (debian lenny)
php : compiled 5.3.3 (so the option JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE is not available for json_encode)
mysql: 5.1.49 with MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8),
class: using a modified PFBC2.x version for the php form building
meta
The website is mostly for french users so it's all designed with ISO-8859-1 (bad initial choice I guess) :
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
jQuery autocomplete code (applied to the city input field)
// DEBUG Testing (tested w/ and w/o the $charset_attr: no change)
$charset_attr = 'contentType: "application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=ISO-8859-1"';
echo 'jQuery("#' . $this->attributes["id"] . '").autocomplete({source:"' , $this->xhr_path . '", minLength:2, ' . $charset_attr .'});';
The generated code for that input field is matching the above expection.
Converting mysql rows into utf8 using this function :
I convert the msyql returned array into utf8 prior to sending json back to the client. Actually I tested and wrote also other functions, but this does not change anything so I guess the point is not there.
$encoded_arr = utf8json($returnData);
echo json_encode($encoded_arr);
flush();
Encoding control 1 (client side)
A embed control in the html form in order to check which char encoding is actually passed to jQuery.autocomplete :
jQuery(document).ready(function() {
<?php
$test_str ="foobar";
$check_encoding = "'" . mb_detect_encoding($test_str) . "'";
?>
alert('Check charset server encoding: ' + <?php echo $check_encoding;?> ); // output : ASCII
});
Encoding control 2 (server side)
$inputData = (isset($_GET))? htmlspecialchars($_GET['term'],ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8') : NULL;
$encoding_get = mb_detect_encoding($_GET['term']);
$encoding_data = mb_detect_encoding($inputData);
$utf8converted = #iconv(strtolower($encoding_get), 'utf-8', $inputData);
$checkconversion = mb_detect_encoding($utf8converted);
Sending lowcase normal characters (ea..), I get all as ASCII.
Sending lowcase accented characters (éèà..), I get all as UTF8.
So I'm lost as the server receives the proper char string, produces a json return (tested without ajax) but it looks like the client does not receive or interprate this properly.
For those facing the same kind of ...%$# issue, here is what I've done to solve my case :
Checking the char encoding at each node (eg client, apache server, mysql server), using mb_detect_encoding on the server side,
Finally pointed out the problem location node : in my case passing UTF8 chars to the mysql server i/o latin ISO-8859-1, so mysql server did not return the expected answers, which I could not detect or debug with direct url POSTing data to the server script. So I had log the input and output in a file, checking entry character encoding and mysql server output.
Changed the ajax request to POST i/o GET,
Solved by encoding $_POST data to ISO prior sending the mysql server request, using mb_convert_encoding, as well described here.

How to ensure variables submitted in UTF8 using jquery $.post

I have been struggling with this for three days now and this is what i have got and i cannot understand why i am seeing this behavior.
my problem is that i have a MySql spanish db with char set and collation defined as utf8_general_ci. when i query the data base in delete.php like this "DELETE FROM countryNames WHERE country = '$name'"
the specified row doesnot get deleted. i am setting the variable $name in delete.php through a post variable $name=$_post['data'] . mostly $name gets the value in spanish characters e.g español, México etc. the delete.php file gets called from main.php.if i send a post message from main.php $.post("delete.php", {data:filename}); , the query doesnot deletes the entry (although the 'filename' string is in utf8) but if i create a form and then post my data variable in main.php, the query works!! the big question to me is why do i have to submit a form for the query to work? what im seeing is my database rejects the value if it comes from a jquery post call but accepts it when its from a submitted form. (i make no code change for the query to work. just post the value by submiting the form)
First of all, to see what charset ìs used for requests, install something like Firebug and check the 'Content-Type' header of your request/response. It will look something like 'application/json; charset=...'. This should be charset=utf-8 in your case.
My guess why it worked when posting a form is probably because of x-www-form-urlencoded - non-alphanumeric characters are additionally encoded on the client side and again decoded on the server, that's the difference to posting the data directly.
This means that somewhere there is a wrong encoding at work. PHP treats your strings agnostic to its encoding by default, so I would tend to rule it out as the source of the error. jQuery.post also uses UTF-8 by default... so my suspect is the filename variable. Are you sure it is in UTF-8? Where and how do you retrieve it?
You should probably also ensure that the actual HTML page is also sent as UTF-8 and not, let's say iso-8859-1. Have a look at this article for a thorough explanation on how to get it right.
guys this was a Mac problem!! i just tested it on windows as my server and now everything works fine. So beware when u r using Mac as a server with MySql having UTF8 as charset and collation. I guess the Mac stores the folder and file name in some different encoding and not UTF-8.
You answer might be here: How to set encoding in .getJSON JQuery
As it says there, use $.ajax instead of $.post and you can set encoding.
OR, as it says in the 2nd answer use $.ajaxSetup to set the encoding accordingly.
Use .serialize() ! I think it will work. More info: http://api.jquery.com/serialize/

Why doesn't jQuery.parseJSON() work on all servers?

Hey there, I have an Arabic contact script that uses Ajax to retrieve a response from the server after filling the form.
On some apache servers, jQuery.parseJSON() throws an invalid json excepion for the same json it parses perfectly on other servers. This exception is thrown only on chrome and IE.
The json content gets encoded using php's json_encode() function. I tried sending the correct header with the json data and setting the unicode to utf-8, but that didn't help.
This is one of the json responses I try to parse (removed the second part of if because it's long):
{"pageTitle":"\u062e\u0637\u0623 \u0639\u0646\u062f \u0627\u0644\u0625\u0631\u0633\u0627\u0644 !"}
Note: This language of this data is Arabic, that's why it looks like this after being parsed with php's json_encode().
You can try to make a request in the examples given down and look at the full response data using firebug or webkit developer tools. The response passes jsonlint!
Finally, I have two urls using the same version of the script, try to browse them using chrome or IE to see the error in the broken example.
The working example : http://namodg.com/n/
The broken example: http://www.mt-is.co.cc/my/call-me/
Updated: To clarify more, I would like to note that I manged to fix this by using the old eval() to parse the content, I released another version with this fix, it was like this:
// Parse the JSON data
try
{
// Use jquery's default parser
data = $.parseJSON(data);
}
catch(e)
{
/*
* Fix a bug where strange unicode chars in the json data makes the jQuery
* parseJSON() throw an error (only on some servers), by using the old eval() - slower though!
*/
data = eval( "(" + data + ")" );
}
I still want to know if this is a bug in jquery's parseJSON() method, so that I can report it to them.
Found the problem! It was very hard to notice, but I saw something funny about that opening brace... there seemed to be a couple of little dots near it. I used this JavaScript bookmarklet to find out what it was:
javascript:window.location='http://www.google.com/search?q=u+'+('000'+prompt('String?').charCodeAt(prompt('Index?')).toString(16)).slice(-4)
I got the results page. Guess what the problem is! There is an invisible character, repeated twice actually, at the beginning of your output. The zero width non-breaking space is also called the Unicode byte order mark (BOM). It is the reason why jQuery is rejecting your otherwise valid JSON and why pasting the JSON into JSONLint mysteriously works (depending on how you do it).
One way to get this unwanted character into your output is to save your PHP files using Windows Notepad in UTF-8 mode! If this is what you are doing, get another text editor such as Notepad++. Resave all your PHP files without the BOM to fix your problem.
Step 1: Set up Notepad++ to encode files in UTF-8 without BOM by default.
Step 2: Open each existing PHP file, change the Encoding setting, and resave it.
You should try using json2.js (it's on https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js)
Even John Resig (creator of jQuery) says you should:
This version of JSON.js is highly recommended. If you're still using the old version, please please upgrade (this one, undoubtedly, cause less issues than the previous one).
http://ejohn.org/blog/the-state-of-json/
I don't see anything related to parseJSON()
The only difference I see is that in the working example a session-cookie is set(guess it is needed for the "captcha", the mathematical calculation), in the other example no session-cookie is set. So maybe the comparision of the calculation-result fails without the session-cookie.

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