Re: Fixed dynamic chat bug regarding special characters

The special char problem appears to be all fixed.
The script now has a new variable, $charSetString, which can be used to identify the charset string constant as specified at http://php.net/htmlentities
Since this setting is user specified, any person using the script in any language, should be able to insert the script in their page, specify the desired charset string that matches their page, and the message parser will automatically encode the message string accordingly at runtime.
The drawback though, which there is no answer for that I know of, is that if a user inputs a string of characters that is not supported by the page's charset, the message will likely not display those characters correctly. I don't see any solution to this, other than what I've done by allowing the script message encoder to exactly reflect the charset for the parent page.
The reason for my own pages being displayed in iso-8859-1 has to do with the html generator I use, which overwrites any modified pages with new ones whenever I publish updates to the site. This means that over 150 pages or so are updated if I manually change the charset for any of them. Stupid yes, but it would be too much difficulty to change to a new editor at this point... I get a headache just thinking about all that recoding...
----- Original Message ----- From: "Octavian Rasnita" <orasnita@xxxxxxxxx> 
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 04, 2008 12:55 PM
Subject: Re: Fixed dynamic chat bug regarding special characters
If you use UTF-8, you won't need to do that, because each char for each language has a special code if it is encoded with UTF-8. The english chars are represented using a single byte, but the special chars in other languages can be represented using more than 1 byte for a character so there won't be any conflict with other chars from other languages.
But as I said, I don't know if this is very easy to do with PHP if you don't use a framework that does the encoding/decoding of UTF-8 chars automaticly. 

Octavian
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bryan Garaventa" <bgaraventa11@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 04, 2008 10:22 PM
Subject: Re: Fixed dynamic chat bug regarding special characters
I know, the problem is that I can't be certain which char set the page will be for any user who is using the chat script, so it has to be able to handle this automatically. 

This should do the trick at
http://php.net/htmlentities
For instance, making a setting in the config file to enter the desired char set string, then something like the following statement would convert the message at runtime 
$msg = htmlentities($msg, ENT_NOQUOTES, $charSetString);

Will give this a go in a bit.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Octavian Rasnita" <orasnita@xxxxxxxxx> 
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 04, 2008 3:02 AM
Subject: Re: Fixed dynamic chat bug regarding special characters
Well, when using UTF-8, you don't even need to use character entities. You can use simple UTF-8 chars and they display correctly. 

Octavian
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bryan Garaventa" <bgaraventa11@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 04, 2008 10:52 AM
Subject: Re: Fixed dynamic chat bug regarding special characters
Thanks, I'll look into it. I think I've stumbled across the problem, looks like the characters are being saved correctly, and also retrieved correctly, but the html entities are not being converted to html equivalents. 

I found the page at
http://www.prolifique.com/entities.php.txt
which may help fix this, I'll play around with it and see if I can implement something usable within the parser.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Octavian Rasnita" <orasnita@xxxxxxxxx> 
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 04, 2008 12:16 AM
Subject: Re: Fixed dynamic chat bug regarding special characters
Those chars are in romanian language, but I don't think this is important, because UTF-8 should treat all unicode chars the same. 

Oh, I've re-visited your page and I've seen:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> 

I don't think it is sane to use ISO-8859-1 these days.
I think that all the pages should use UTF-8 for beeing able to display correctly special chars in more languages.
I don't know how easy is to use UTF-8 when using PHP, but there are more PHP frameworks and I think most of them should be using UTF-8 as a default... 

Octavian
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bryan Garaventa" <bgaraventa11@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 04, 2008 8:49 AM
Subject: Re: Fixed dynamic chat bug regarding special characters
Can you tell me which language set the characters belong to? This is turning out to be a bit difficult to track down. What I need to do is convert the special chars into a Unicode string, then convert them back without any data loss. Perhaps a combo of utf8 and base64 encoding might help, but I'm not sure what to test against. Knowing the language and chars that you are entering would help. 

Thanks.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Octavian Rasnita" <orasnita@xxxxxxxxx> 
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2008 10:22 PM
Subject: Re: Fixed dynamic chat bug regarding special characters



Hi Brian,
Yes I've tested again and now with Firefox, but the special chars are still not printed correctly. 
I guess those chars are send using UTF-8 encoding.

Octavian
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bryan Garaventa" <bgaraventa11@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 04, 2008 5:16 AM
Subject: Fixed dynamic chat bug regarding special characters
Octavian, regarding the issue that you mentioned earlier about the chat app not displaying special characters correctly, could you test this when you have a chance to see if the chat form is now accepting special characters? This should be fixed. I changed the save method from urlencode/urldecode to base64_encode/base64_decode, which should correct the problem. I think... 
http://gutterstar.net/dynamic_live_chat.php
Thanks,
Bryan

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