For some time from now, I was wondering if there was a way, so that I can handle special characters {{!@#$%^&*()_’/” }} while posting the data using AJAX.

Then suddenly I came to the conclusion that if we can URL ENCODE the data before posting through AJAX in JAVASCRIPT then it should be possible.

This is can be achieved by using JavaScript’s’ function escape();

escape() :- converts a string to URL-encoding

This native function converts a string to URL-encoded form suitable for transmitting a query string (or part of the URL).

This native function works as follows:

Digits, Latin letters and the characters {{+ – * /. _ @}} remains unchanged and all other characters in the original string will be replaced by escape-sequences %XX, where XX is the ASCII code of the original character. Example:

escape(“The month of October Mahesh’s & Raghu’s Birthday”)
// result: The%20month%20of%20October%20Mahesh%27s%20%26%20Raghu%27s%20Birthday

To know more about the ASCII Codes, I refer the following URL:

http://www.ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm

In Unicode-aware browsers (that support JavaScript 1.3) the function escape has a more complex behavior. If the input is a Unicode string, then Unicode characters will be converted to the Unicode escape-sequences %uXXXX.

Ajax example of posting special character using escape:

Var strData = escape(“Mahesh’s & Raghu’s”)
$.ajax({
type: “POST”,
url: HTTP_SERVER+DIR_WS_HTTP+”xxxx.php”,
data: “actionType=”+actionType+”&userName”+strData,
success: function(msg)
{
Alert(msg);
}
});

Last week, we had project where we have to install and customize the new osCommerce 2.2rc2a on one of our client server having php5 and apache 2.2

The problem here is that the apache 2.2 by default does not takes the long arrays that is $HTTP_GET_VARS, $HTTP_POST_VARS

So, in order to run the osCommerce on the apache2.2 and php 5.0, we did a lot of googling, this is could be helpful to others to integrate osCommerce 2.2 on apache 2.2 with php5, we just need to add or update the .htaccess file with the following information.

# Explorer browsers

<IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
<IfDefine SSL>
SetEnvIf User-Agent “.*MSIE.*” \
nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
</IfDefine>
</IfModule>

# PHP configuration values
#    php_value register_globals On

<IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
<IfDefine SSL>
SetEnvIf User-Agent “.*MSIE.*” \
nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
</IfDefine>
</IfModule>

# PHP configuration values

<IfModule mod_php5.c>
php_flag register_long_arrays On
php_flag register_globals On
php_flag display_errors Off
</IfModule>

<IfModule mod_php4.c>
php_value session.use_trans_sid 0
php_value register_globals 1
php_flag display_errors On
php_flag track_errors Off
</IfModule>