JQuery Autocomplete Special Character (Norwegian) Problems

I'm using jQuery's autocomplete function on my Norwegian site. When typing in the Norwegian characters æ, ø and å, the autocomplete function suggests words with the respective c

Solution 1:

The bug (I think):

• Strtolower() will not lowercase special characters.
• Therefore, you are not converting capital special characters in your re-write function (Ä Æ Ø Å etc.)

if I understand the code correctly, a query for Øygarden(Notice the capital Ø) would leave the first character in its original form Ø, but you are querying against the urlencode()d form which should be %C3%98

You should use mb_convert_case() specifying UTF-8 as the encoding.

Let me know whether this solves it.

General re-writing suggestions

Your code could be replaced 100% using standard PHP functions, which can handle all Unicode characters instead of just those you specify, thus being less prone to bugs. I think the functionality of your custom rewrite() function could be replaced by

• urldecode()
• iconv()

you would then get proper UTF-8 encoded data that you don't need to utf8_encode() any more. It could be possible to get a cleaner approach that way that works for all characters. It could also be that that already sorts whatever bug there is (if the bug is in your code).

Solution 2:

I'm using a similar configuration but with Danish characters (æ, ø and å) and I do not have a problem with any characters. Are you sure you are encoding all characters correctly?

My response contains a | delimited list of values. All values are UTF-8 encoded (that's how they are stored in the database), and I set the content type to text/plain; charset=utf-8 using php's header function. The last bit is not needed for it to work though.

• Frank

Solution 3:

Thank you for all answers and help. I certainly learned some new things about PHP and encoding :)

But the solution that worked for me was this:

I found out that the jQuery autocomplete function actually UTF-8 encodes and lowercase special character before sending it to the PHP function. So when I write out the arrays of suggest content, I used my rewrite()-function to encode the special characters. So in my compare function I only had to lowercase everything.

Now it works great!

Solution 4:

I had similar problem. solution in my case was urldecode() php function to convert string back to it's original and than send query to db.