codeigniter doesn't redirect to utf-8 url

Question

I'm trying to implement search form to my website using Codeigniter 3.0 and I'm having some issues with redirect() method.

What I want to do is when I type some string and press enter, it will do a post request to a controller then the controller will get the string and redirect current url to http://example.com/search/string

So, here are the codes that I have:

Search form:

<form action="/search" method="post" accept-charset="UTF-8">

A controller which gets search string and do redirect:

public function do_search() {
    $search = $this->input->post('search');

    log_message('debug', 'search: ' . $search);

    if ($search) {
       redirect('search/' . $search, 'refresh');
    } else {
       redirect('/', 'refresh');
    }
}

config.php:

$config['permitted_uri_chars'] = 'üÜöÖğĞıİəƏçÇşŞ a-z 0-9~%.:_\-';

Also, I have following code on my base controller: MY_Controller

$this->output->set_header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

Now, when I type "həə" on my search form, it does redirect, but url becomes like "hÉÉ" . As you see I'm logging search string on my controller, which prints correctly. (like "həə" ).

Am I missing something? Any ideas how to solve this?

Answer 1

Non ascii support is a general problem in software and it is a very special problem in browser related software. What you should do is, fetch the incoming values and have a kind of logic and do a remap. Codeigniter has a build in remap function.

It is called by:

function _remap($method)
    {
      // here your logic

    }

You can have this function in every controller.

A small tipp: If you are supporting multi-languages, then you should transfer on every request the language in your GET or POST or Cookie and have a kind of logic. Otherwise you will have trouble.

Answer 2

I wrote a small jQuery code to do redirection, and it did work in my case.

$("form[name=search]").submit(function (e) {
  e.preventDefault();
  window.location = "/search/" + $("input[name=search]").val();
});