Building Chinese Web Sites using PHP
Dr. Herong Yang, Version 2.11

Steps and Components Involved

This section describes steps and application components involved in inputting non-ASCII characters through Web forms.

In order to capture input text from Web forms and display it back on Web pages properly, you need to understand how an input text is being collected by the Web browser, and delivered to the PHP engine through various application components. Here is a simplified diagram that shows the steps and application components involved in this process:

F1. Key Sequences from keyboard
      |
      |- Web browser
      v
F2. HTTP Request
      |
      |- Web server
      v
F3. CGI input
      |
      |- PHP engine
      v
F4. CGI output
      |
      |- Web server
      v
F5. HTTP response (HTML document)
      |
      |- Web browser
      v
F6. Characters on the screen

If you decided to use UTF-8 encoding to handle non-ASCII characters, you need to make sure that all application components mentioned in the above diagram are friendly to UTF-8 encoding. See the following picture:
Inputting non-ASCII Characters on Web Forms

Sections in This Chapter

Steps and Components Involved

Processing Web Form Input in ASCII

Processing Web Form Input in Latin1

Entering Latin1 Characters with Alt Keycodes

Testing Latin1 Alt Keycodes with IE

Processing Web Form Input in UTF-8

Outputting Form Default Input Text in UTF-8

Testing Alt Keycodes with IE on a UTF-8 Web Page

Dr. Herong Yang, updated in 2007
Steps and Components Involved