Setting the character encoding in form submit for Internet Explorer

Question

I have a page that contains a form. This page is served with content type text/html;charset=utf-8. I need to submit this form to server using ISO-8859-1 character encoding. Is this possible with Internet Explorer?

Setting accept-charset attribute to form element, like this, works for Firefox, Opera etc. but not for IE.

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

Edit: This form is created by server A and will be submitted to server B. I have no control over server B.

If I set server A to serve content with charset ISO-8859-1 everything works, but I am looking a way to make this work without changes to server A's encoding. I have another question about setting the encoding in server A.

Solution 1

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>!

Solution 2

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.

Solution 3

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.

Solution 4

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.

Solution 5

For Russian symbols 'windows-1251'

<form action="yourProcessPage.php" method="POST" accept-charset="utf-8">
<input name="string" value="string" />
...
</form>

When simply convert string to cp1251

$string = $_POST['string'];
$string = mb_convert_encoding($string, "CP1251", "UTF-8");

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