HTML String and encoding

Question

I think I'm chasing my tail a bit here and would appreciate someone setting me straight. In my Javascript program, I need to POST a HTML string using AJAX to my PHP server. The HTML string may have embedded image data in it.

Part 1: Simple case - HTML string is only text - for example - "Mmiz's question"

<p>Mmiz&#39;s question</p>

If I do nothing wrt encoding, the POST seems to clobber everything after the apostrophe and it's just "Mmiz" on the server side. Using escape() did not fix the problem either! What should I be doing to safely transport the html string to the server?

Part 2: If there is image data in the html, I base 64 URL safe encode the image data using:

encodeURIComponent(str).replace(/'/g,"%27").replace(/"/g,"%22");

Is this the right way to go about it?

Thanks for the guidance!

Mmiz

Answer 1

My guess is that you are sending your data either as GET data or form data. In either case, & marks the end of the parameter and that start of the next one. You MUST encode this. Additionally, it is a good idea to encode other characters too, such as using encodeURIComponent .

That said, you might want to look into an alternative method. For instance, I like to just submit my data straight to the server with no complications, so the request would look like:

POST /somefile.php HTTP/1.0
Host: example.com
Content-Type: text/plain     -- or some relevant type, like application/json
Content-Length: 13

Hello, World!

Then on the server side, in PHP in this case, I can just use file_get_contents("php://input") to retrieve the data, no problems whatsoever.