Question

what the built-in or user-defined function that I can use in Javascript or jQuery to convert from one character encoding to another?

For Example,
FROM “utf-8” TO “windows-1256”
OR
FROM “windows-1256” TO “utf-8”

A practical use of that is if you have a php page with specific character encoding like “windows-1256” that you could not change it according to the business needs and when you use ajax to send a block data from database using json which uses “utf-8” encoding only so you need to convert the ouput of json to this encoding so that the characters and the strings will be displayed well

Thanks in advance …..

Answer 1

From the standpoint of a JavaScript runtime environment, there’s really no such thing as character encodings – the messiness of encodings is abstracted away from you. By spec, all JS source text is interpreted as Unicode characters, and all Strings are Unicode.

As such, there’s no way in JavaScript to represent characters in anything other than Unicode. Look at the methods available on a String instance – you’ll see there’s nothing related to character encoding.

Because JavaScript runs in Unicode, and all JavaScript strings are stored in Unicode, all AJAX calls will be transmitted over the wire in Unicode. From the jQuery AJAX docs:

Data will always be transmitted to the server using UTF-8 charset; you must decode this appropriately on the server side.

Your PHP script is going to have to cope with Unicode input from AJAX calls.