Handle foreign character web input

[Thomas Jollans]

On 28/06/2019 22:25, Tobiah wrote:
> A guy comes in and enters his last name as RÖnngren.
With a capital Ö in the middle? That's unusual.
>
> So what did the browser really give me; is it encoded
> in some way, like latin-1?  Does it depend on whether
> the name was cut and pasted from a Word doc. etc?
> Should I handle these internally as unicode?  Right
> now my database tables are latin-1 and things seem
> to usually work, but not always.


If your database is using latin-1, German and French names will work, 
but Croatian and Polish names often won't. Not to mention people using 
other writing systems.

So Günther and François are ok, but Bolesław turns into Boles?aw and 
don't even think about anybody called Владимир or محمد.


>
> Also, what do people do when searching for a record.
> Is there some way to get 'Ronngren' to match the other
> possible foreign spellings?