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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T02:59:07+00:00

I have a contenteditable div where I’m reading individual characters and sending them off

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I have a contenteditable div where I’m reading individual characters and sending them off to a server (for more background this is similar to Google Wave where typing a character automatically sends it)

I was using a plain old html textfield before and everything worked fine until I “upgraded” to a contenteditable div.

My problem is that now the characters are in UTF-8 format, which is causing some weird problems on the server that I would rather not debug. It would be much easier to force everything to be ASCII on the client side.

Is there any way to do this? I tried putting in a meta tag stating the html file is charset=ISO-8859-1, but it doesnt seem to work. Reading from the div tag still returns UTF-8 codes. (One example is when I press space I get the pair 0xC2 0xA0 which corresponds to a “non-breaking white space”

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Why are you using ASCII for user input? You’re just delaying an enormous headache.

    But, to answer your question: if your application expects ASCII, you need to check user input and convert it to ASCII manually. It sounds like you need to be checking every keystroke and converting it on-the-fly before it is even rendered to the screen. charset doesn’t apply to user input, that is dependant on system-specific settings.

    But again: just use UTF-8.

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