Server-side filtering and accented characters

gcanac

Hello!

I'm facing an issue with the filtering functionnality of DataTables. It works fine when I use simple latin characters but it makes postgresql crash every time I type an accented letter.

I'm running php5.5 and my website is UTF-8 encoded (other forms work well).

Here's my datatable init, stripped with all the language/column definitions:

doc_table = $('#doc-table').DataTable({
  'serverSide': true,
  'sortClasses':false,
  'dom': 'frtiS',
  'scrollY': 200,
  'ajax': {
    'url':'docs',
    'type':'POST',
  }
});

In my php script I get the search value with:

$search = Input::get('search')['value']; // Laravel $_POST

If I type 'é' and then log $search, it displays 'é', which doesn't seem right).
The 'htmlentities' method returns 'é' (so it's the right character). If I try to execute a simple pg query with $search as a parameter, it crashes with error:

SQLSTATE[22021]: Character not in repertoire: 7 ERROR:  invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xe3 0xa9 0xe3'

I tried several PHP methods to convert/encode/decode back and forth, but no luck so far.

Has anyone faced a similar issue and managed to find a solution?

Thank you

gcanac

Hello!

I still can't find where lies the issue. Does anyone have any idea?

ignignokt

Is your query running é or é? Somewhere along the line it seems to be getting encoded and not decoded. You should see the é if you utf8_decode() your $search variable.

$string = "é";
$string = utf8_encode($string);
echo $string; // é
$string = utf8_decode($string);
echo $string; // é

gcanac

Thank you for taking the time to answer me.

The query was running é (and crashed).

Your answer did no directly solved the problem, but it made me realize that my strtolower was causing the issue. I replaced it by mb_strtolower and it works fine without having to use utf8_decode.

Thanks for your time & help!