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

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

This section provides a test on Latin1 Alt keycodes with Internet Explorer (IE) on a Web page with UTF-8 encoding.

There is no easy way to enter Unicode characters in a Web form, unless you are using a non-English key board, a non-English operating system, or an add-on character input application. But for testing purposes, I tried to enter characters as Latin1 Alt keycodes on a Web page defined as UTF-8 encoding. This Web page was generated by the same PHP script, Web-Form-Input-UTF8-Revised.php, described in the previous section.

1. Start Internet Explorer (IE) with this URL: http://localhost/Web-Form-Input-Revised.php.

2. Press the "num lock" key to turn on "num lock" for the numeric key pad.

3. In the text input box, remove the default text. Now enter <Alt>+0128 by pressing and holding down the Alt key and pressing 0, 1, 2, 8 on the numeric key pad. Release the Alt key. The Euro sign shows up.

4. Repeat the same process to enter four more Alt keycodes: <Alt>+0169, <Alt>+0231, <Alt>+0232, and <Alt>+0233.

5. Click the Submit button. The five special characters shows up on the returning Web page with their Hex number values confirming that the PHP script received them correctly.

Entering UTF-8 Characters with Alt Keycodes

6. Check the page URL in the page address box. The five special characters are encoded inside the URL: This indicates that IE is smart. It converts the Latin1 character 0x80 (decimal code value 128) to the UTF-8 byte sequence 0xE282.

http://localhost/test.php
  ?Input=%E2%82%AC%C2%A9%C3%A7%C3%A8%C3%A9&Submit=Submit

Conclusion:

UTF-8 byte sequence can be displayed correctly on Web pages, if "charset" is provided in the HTML header.
There is no easy way to enter UTF-8 byte sequence values in Web form, unless a non-English keyboard is used
Some special characters can be entered as Alt keycodes in Latin1 encoding on a Web page with charset=utf-8. IE will do the conversion for you.