Question

Quick question, how can I make this valid :

if($this->datos->bathrooms == "1½"){$select1 = JText::_( 'selected="selected"' );}

The ½ doesn’t seem to be recognized. I tried to write it as ½ but then it looks for ½ literally, and not the ½ sign. Any ideas?

Answer 1

As many others have noted, you have a character encoding problem, most likely. I’m not sure what encodings PHP supports but you need to take the whole picture into account. For this example I’m assuming your PHP script is responding to a FORM post.

1. Some app (yours, most likely) writes some HTML which is encoded using some encoding and sent to the browser. Common choices are ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8. You should always use UTF-8 if you can. Note: it’s not the default for the web (sadly).
2. The browser downloads this html and renders the page. Browsers use Unicode internally, mostly, or some superset. The user submits a form. The data in that form is encoded, usually with the same encoding that the page was sent in. So if you send UTF-8 it gets sent back to you as UTF-8.
3. PHP reads the bytes of the incoming request and sets up its internal variables. This is where you might have a problem, if it is not picking the right encoding.

4. You are doing a string comparison, which decomposes to a byte comparison, but the bytes that make up the characters depends on the encoding used. As Peter Bailey wrote,

   • In ISO-8859-1 this character is encoded as 0xBD
   • In UTF-8 this character is encoded as 0xC2BD

You need to verify the text encoding along each step of the way to make sure it is happening as you expect. You can verify the data sent to the browser by changing the encoding from the browser’s auto-detected encoding to something else to see how the page changes.

If your data is not coming from the browser, but rather from the DB, you need to check the encodings between your app and the DB.

Finally, I’d suggest that it’s impractical to use a string like 1½ as a key for comparison as you are. I’d recommend using 1.5 and detecting that at display time, then changing how the data is displayed only. Advantages: you can order the results by number of bathrooms if the value is numeric as opposed to a string, etc. Plus you avoid bugs like this one.