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Asked: 2026-05-27T11:09:20+00:00

I’m using the basic PayPal shopping cart (Website Payments Standard). I have the following

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I’m using the basic PayPal shopping cart (Website Payments Standard).

I have the following in my HTML as part of an item description:

<div class="block">
    <p>What&rsquo;s yours?</p>
    <!-- some other html -->
</div>

I then select this piece of text like this:

phrase = $('.block p:first').text();

I have also tried this:

phrase = $('.block p:first').html();

Then, before it’s submitted, I copy it into the form like this:

$('#PayPalForm input[name=os1]').val(phrase);

The form looks like this:

<form id="PayPalForm" target="paypal" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
    <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_cart" />
    <input type="hidden" name="business" value="redacted" />
    <input type="hidden" name="no_note" value="1" />
    <input type="hidden" name="add" value="1" />
    <input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US" />
    <input type="hidden" name="return" value="paypal_confirm.html" />
    <input type="hidden" name="cancel_return" value="redacted" />
    <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD" />
    <input type="hidden" name="bn" value="PP-ShopCartBF" />
    <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="" />
    <input type="hidden" name="on1" value="phrase" />
    <input type="hidden" name="os1" id="os1" value="" />
</form>

This is my HTML doctype:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

This is my text encoding:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />

It’s working. However, when the remotely hosted cart page opens (at PayPal), the phrase is displayed with non-sensical characters where an apostrophe should be.

phrase: What’s yours?

At the very least I would have expected the raw &rsquo; to display rather than a ’.

Why did this happen and what can I do to clean it up?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You should be able to specify the encoding of the information contained in your form: Setting the Character Set – charset.

    <input type="hidden" name="charset" value="utf-8">
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