How do you do a file upload in an HTML form without running into mojibake?
I have a form that has three fields:
a file field
a required text field
a text field which accepts Japanese characters
I've set up my HTML form with the attribute enctype='multipart/form-data'. But when the form submission fails due to the missing required field, I get redirected to the same page but my 2nd text field (the one that accepts the Jap. chars) is already mojibaked.
However, if I remove the enctype or change it to anything else, and when the form submission fails, I see the Japanese chars as they are (no mojibake). The problem is, if this succeeds, I am unable to read the uploaded files.
Any ideas how to fix this??
Mojibake (mangled display of Japanese characters) can have two causes:
The data on the page is in the right character encoding, but the browser does not recognize it.
Some characters on the page use the wrong encoding (the server wrote them in an incorrect encoding).
If the other characters on the page (outside of your form) show correctly, you produced broken output on your server.
If everything is clobbered, and you can fix it by manually setting a different encoding from the browser's menu, then the page encoding is not properly specified.
What kind of content-type headers and HTML meta tags do you use?
I've figured it out (by reverse-engineering appfuse (appfuse.org) which does not seem to be affected by mojibake with its file upload form ).
It solved it by setting the charset encoding to UTF-8 in the server side (with spring's org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter ). Thus, I guess multipart-/form-data really does screw up the character encoding ( or at least for java ).
Related
I have a test site and test DB both set to windows-1252. When I type Alt+234 into Chrome it puts this symbol in the field: Ω. And when I submit the form it posts and stores it as Ω I'm assuming this is the browser saying "hey, this isn't in the specified charset but I do know of an html equivalent, so I'll post that instead". Fine. The symbol appears properly after saving, I can save, save, save, and it always appears fine. But if I try the same thing with Alt+230 the browser does not submit it's html entity value of µ. Instead I see "(unable to decode value)" when viewing the POST in the Chrome DevTool window. And it ends up being stored in the database as a question mark.
Why does it treat Alt+234 (Ω) differently than Alt+230 (µ)?
I know I should switch to UTF8 but I still would like to know why it is functioning this way. Thanks!
Using encodeURIComponent to wrap the value fixed the problem.
Broken:
`?value=${myValue}`
Working:
`?value=${encodeURIComponent(myValue)}`
U+03A9 Ω Greek capital letter omega is not part of Windows code page 1252.
U+00B5 µ Micro sign (which is not the exact same character as Greek mu) is part of 1252 (byte 181).
The Alt+keypad shortcut numbers don't align with code page 1252, or the current ANSI code page in general, so being able to type a character from that shortcut doesn't imply membership of those code pages. Instead they are from DOS code page 437.
And when I submit the form it posts and stores it as Ω I'm assuming this is the browser saying "hey, this isn't in the specified charset but I do know of an html equivalent, so I'll post that instead"
Yes, this is a long-standing weird unrecoverable mangling that HTML5 finally standardised, for when a character is not encodable in the encoding the page has requested.
Instead I see "(unable to decode value)" when viewing the POST in the Chrome DevTool window. And it ends up being stored in the database as a question mark.
The browser will be sending that character as code page 1252 byte 181. The devtools and whatever your application is aren't expecting to be dealing with code page 1252 bytes... probably they are expecting UTF-8. Because byte 181 on its own is not a valid UTF-8 sequence they can't keep it.
I have an application on Apache. My Apache is configured with default encoding ISO-8859, and I´m not able to change it because Apache suport others applications that need this.
Then, in my application I´m using numerical HTML encoding in special characters, like that: Usu& #225;rio (this is Usuário).
It´s working fine, but in placeholders and title (HTML5 elements), the interface is showing á ; instead to show á.
Any idea?
Thanks
You could rename your .html file to .php and add following line to the first row:
<?php header('Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8'); ?>
This will send a response from server that the content which is sent is encoded in utf-8.
By adding above code nothing will be broken and you wont see any difference exept for correct encoding.
In case you need to move the site from one server to another, you can undo those steps and everything will still work as expected.
It tried to reproduce your issue with the given HTML entity and placeholder encodes the character correctly.
Resolved. I used unicode code point instead numerical HTML encoding. Take a look at UTF-8 encoding table and unicode characters here.
When I use Chrome, Firefox or Opera i have no problem with my website under Desktop computer, but when I use default Android browser (also on Google search preview), right menu does not show up. I checked on W3 validator website, but for index page, it says it cannot be checked:
http://volkangezer.scienceontheweb.net/index.php
For another page:
http://volkangezer.scienceontheweb.net/iletisim.php?dil=en
It shows some errors, but probably they are not the reason for this problem.
My first question is why my index.php page cannot be checked? The both pages have exactly the same encoding and include files.
Second question is, why right menu does not show up?
Thank you.
The validator tells you why it can't check it:
Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because on line 350 it contained one or more bytes that I cannot interpret as utf-8 (in other words, the bytes found are not valid values in the specified Character Encoding). Please check both the content of the file and the character encoding indication.
The error was: utf8 "\xC4" does not map to Unicode
In other words, either your file is screwed up or it is encoded using a character encoding that doesn't match the one it claims to use.
See Character encodings for beginners and the documents it links to for more information on the subject.
I've got a legacy app just starting to misbehave, for whatever reason I'm not sure. It generates a bunch of HTML that gets turned into PDF reports by ActivePDF.
The process works like this:
Pull an HTML template from a DB with tokens in it to be replaced (e.g. "~CompanyName~", "~CustomerName~", etc.)
Replace the tokens with real data
Tidy the HTML with a simple regex function that property formats HTML tag attribute values (ensures quotation marks, etc, since ActivePDF's rendering engine hates anything but single quotes around attribute values)
Send off the HTML to a web service that creates the PDF.
Somewhere in that mess, the non-breaking spaces from the HTML template (the s) are encoding as ISO-8859-1 so that they show up incorrectly as an "Â" character when viewing the document in a browser (FireFox). ActivePDF pukes on these non-UTF8 characters.
My question: since I don't know where the problem stems from and don't have time to investigate it, is there an easy way to re-encode or find-and-replace the bad characters? I've tried sending it through this little function I threw together, but it turns it all into gobbledegook doesn't change anything.
Private Shared Function ConvertToUTF8(ByVal html As String) As String
Dim isoEncoding As Encoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1")
Dim source As Byte() = isoEncoding.GetBytes(html)
Return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(Encoding.Convert(isoEncoding, Encoding.UTF8, source))
End Function
Any ideas?
EDIT:
I'm getting by with this for now, though it hardly seems like a good solution:
Private Shared Function ReplaceNonASCIIChars(ByVal html As String) As String
Return Regex.Replace(html, "[^\u0000-\u007F]", " ")
End Function
Somewhere in that mess, the non-breaking spaces from the HTML template (the s) are encoding as ISO-8859-1 so that they show up incorrectly as an "Â" character
That'd be encoding to UTF-8 then, not ISO-8859-1. The non-breaking space character is byte 0xA0 in ISO-8859-1; when encoded to UTF-8 it'd be 0xC2,0xA0, which, if you (incorrectly) view it as ISO-8859-1 comes out as "Â ". That includes a trailing nbsp which you might not be noticing; if that byte isn't there, then something else has mauled your document and we need to see further up to find out what.
What's the regexp, how does the templating work? There would seem to be a proper HTML parser involved somewhere if your strings are (correctly) being turned into U+00A0 NON-BREAKING SPACE characters. If so, you could just process your template natively in the DOM, and ask it to serialise using the ASCII encoding to keep non-ASCII characters as character references. That would also stop you having to do regex post-processing on the HTML itself, which is always a highly dodgy business.
Well anyway, for now you can add one of the following to your document's <head> and see if that makes it look right in the browser:
for HTML4: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
for HTML5: <meta charset="utf-8">
If you've done that, then any remaining problem is ActivePDF's fault.
If any one had the same problem as me and the charset was already correct, simply do this:
Copy all the code inside the .html file.
Open notepad (or any basic text editor) and paste the code.
Go "File -> Save As"
Enter you file name "example.html" (Select "Save as type: All Files (.)")
Select Encoding as UTF-8
Hit Save and you can now delete your old .html file and the encoding should be fixed
Problem:
Even I was facing the problem where we were sending '£' with some string in POST request to CRM System, but when we were doing the GET call from CRM , it was returning '£' with some string content. So what we have analysed is that '£' was getting converted to '£'.
Analysis:
The glitch which we have found after doing research is that in POST call we have set HttpWebRequest ContentType as "text/xml" while in GET Call it was "text/xml; charset:utf-8".
Solution:
So as the part of solution we have included the charset:utf-8 in POST request and it works.
In my case this (a with caret) occurred in code I generated from visual studio using my own tool for generating code. It was easy to solve:
Select single spaces ( ) in the document. You should be able to see lots of single spaces that are looking different from the other single spaces, they are not selected. Select these other single spaces - they are the ones responsible for the unwanted characters in the browser. Go to Find and Replace with single space ( ). Done.
PS: It's easier to see all similar characters when you place the cursor on one or if you select it in VS2017+; I hope other IDEs may have similar features
In my case I was getting latin cross sign instead of nbsp, even that a page was correctly encoded into the UTF-8. Nothing of above helped in resolving the issue and I tried all.
In the end changing font for IE (with browser specific css) helped, I was using Helvetica-Nue as a body font changing to the Arial resolved the issue .
I was having the same sort of problem. Apparently it's simply because PHP doesn't recognise utf-8.
I was tearing my hair out at first when a '£' sign kept showing up as '£', despite it appearing ok in DreamWeaver. Eventually I remembered I had been having problems with links relative to the index file, when the pages, if viewed directly would work with slideshows, but not when used with an include (but that's beside the point. Anyway I wondered if this might be a similar problem, so instead of putting into the page that I was having problems with, I simply put it into the index.php file - problem fixed throughout.
The reason for this is PHP doesn't recognise utf-8.
Here you can check it for all Special Characters in HTML
http://www.degraeve.com/reference/specialcharacters.php
Well I got this Issue too in my few websites and all i need to do is customize the content fetler for HTML entites. before that more i delete them more i got, so just change you html fiter or parsing function for the page and it worked. Its mainly due to HTML editors in most of CMSs. the way they store parse the data caused this issue (In My case). May this would Help in your case too
For example, chinese text(GB2312) is pasted into a text box(or text area) of a html page and the form is posted. At the server side, is there any means by which this character set gets detected?
How would this detection behave if texts belonging to different character sets are pasted in a text box?
You need to tell the browser what encoding to use by adding an accept-charset="UTF-8" (or similar) attribute to the form. Apparently this defaults to the character set of the page, but I wouldn't count on that. The browser won't tell you what encoding it used when it submits the form, so you need to assume it used the one you told it to.
The web browser should send up a content type including encoding when it posts the data.
I find it helpful to think of text as "just text" (without any particular encoding) until an encoding is required. So the browser shouldn't care what encoding (if any) was used to originally produce the text (e.g. if it was copied and pasted from a file, the file's encoding is irrelevant). It decides what encoding to use when posting it to the server, obviously making sure that it's an encoding which covers all the characters it needs to send.
if you use php on the server, you can use mb_detect_encoding