Method Description

WbString.fromUTF8()

Extract a Javascript string from a UTF-8 encoded string

See Also

Syntax

WbString = WbString.fromUTF8(input_string)

Parameters

The 'WbString.fromUTF8' method takes 1 parameter:

Results

The 'WbString.fromUTF8' method returns WbString:

Remarks

Decode a string from a valid UTF-8 form

Note: This is a method method on WbString and so is invoked as WbString.fromUTF8(str);

Characters received from a web-browser or other remote system are often encoded in UTF-8. The way the Whitebeam XML system works with the Spidermonkey engine means that the UTF-8 characters will be simply expanded into 16 bit characters, but not correctly decoded.

For example, the two byte sequence C2 A3 is the correct UTF-8 encoding for the British £ symbol. by default this will appear in Javascript as two 16 bit characters 00C2 00A3, not the correctly decoded single 16 bit character 00A3.

WbString.fromUTF8 will take the initial string and correctly reconstruct the character sequence in Javascript.

Generally AJAX exchanges will use the UTF-8 encoding. It is important to know what encoding is in use for a received string before simply calling fromUTF8. If the string is, for example, LATIN-1, then the decoded string will not be as you expect!

The method returns a new WbString instance that to all intents and purposes can be treated as a standard Javascript string object.

Example

The following code takes a test string from the remore client and correcty builds a Javascript string:

             var params = rb.page.formdata();
             if (params.text!=null) {
               // params.text might contain two 16 bit characters now, eg 00C2 00A3

               params.text = WbString.fromUTF8(params.text);
               // and now correctly contains the single character code 00A3.
             }