jQuery Content Type Option

Hello Everyone,

I just joined your Group and hope to find a guru that can answer this
question.

Preface: I needed to serialize a form and POST it with jQuery AJAX.
I setup the content type for "ISO-8859-1" because that was a
requirement in this case. I set the option in jQuery and on the
server. Well, no matter what I did jQuery always serialized in
"UTF-8". After a lot of pain and suffering I found the solution to
use UTF_Decode on the server side. There is JavaScript function and
PHP function. The JavaScript can "runat server" to support ASP
and .NET as well.

Question: We have customers that will need to use Chinese Char
sets. This decode solution will not always be viable. Why does
jQuery ignore the Content Type I set on the client side? It seems
like this problem would not exist if jQuery simply encoded everything
the way the programmer asks. Is there a way to get jQuery to POST
in the encoding I want, such as simplified Chinese (e.g. gb18030).

I understand someone will likely tell me that I should use UTF-8 for
absolutely everything. But I would still like to know why jQuery's
content type option doesn't work. If that would work it would save a
lot of people a lot of trouble.

I'm really not sure about this, I never tried to get jQuery to send iso
chars myself, but I stumbled upon this on the ajax doc (
http://docs.jquery.com/Ajax/jQuery.ajax#options) :

scriptCharset String
Only for requests with 'jsonp' or 'script' dataType and GET type. Forces the
request to be interpreted as a certain charset. Only needed for charset
differences between the remote and local content.

Where I'm unsure is how you interpret the "Only for requests with 'jsonp' or
'script' dataType and GET type". It may mean it's only for GET requests with
jsonp or script dataType, or that it's only for jsonp for dataType, or GET
requests with script dataType. I'm inclined to guess it's the first since
you're sending a POST and you're not getting it in the propre charset. As
for the reason behind this I can only speculate there might be a browser
issue of some sort, but that's all I have here.

Hope it helps.

Michel Belleville


2009/11/6 webdawg <info (AT) smartweber (DOT) com>

Hello Everyone,

I just joined your Group and hope to find a guru that can answer this
question.

Preface: I needed to serialize a form and POST it with jQuery AJAX.
I setup the content type for "ISO-8859-1" because that was a
requirement in this case. I set the option in jQuery and on the
server. Well, no matter what I did jQuery always serialized in
"UTF-8". After a lot of pain and suffering I found the solution to
use UTF_Decode on the server side. There is JavaScript function and
PHP function. The JavaScript can "runat server" to support ASP
and .NET as well.

Question: We have customers that will need to use Chinese Char
sets. This decode solution will not always be viable. Why does
jQuery ignore the Content Type I set on the client side? It seems
like this problem would not exist if jQuery simply encoded everything
the way the programmer asks. Is there a way to get jQuery to POST
in the encoding I want, such as simplified Chinese (e.g. gb18030).

I understand someone will likely tell me that I should use UTF-8 for
absolutely everything. But I would still like to know why jQuery's
content type option doesn't work. If that would work it would save a
lot of people a lot of trouble.