AJAX Magazine: AjaxAC and Middle Eastern encoding

AjaxAC is an open-source framework written in PHP, used to develop/create/generate AJAX applications. I've noticed many problems concerning AjaxAC and Middle Eastern encoding, it will be also valid for Unicode and East-Asian encoding too. The first thing is in the AjaxACApplication.class.php function sendResponseData(), you can see in the end of the function :

This will never work with Middle Eastern encoding like windows-1256. First there is no need to set Content-length, and then we should have something like that :

So to do something general, we can use the _defaultCharset parameter in the beginning and set it to the charset that we need. So if you got Javascript error just replace the default charset ( UTF-8 ) with your current charset :

Now you can try sample code like GoogleSuggestCloneJax and retrieve data in arabic using AjaxAC just change in GoogleSuggestCloneJax.class.php the getSuggestions() function with this one

/**
 * Get the suggestions from the database and write to array
 */
function getSuggestions($prefix, &$arr)
{
	$conn = @mysql_connect($this->db_hostname, $this->db_username, $this->db_password);
	if (!$conn)
		return;
	if (!@mysql_select_db($this->db_database, $conn)) {
		mysql_close($conn);
		return;
	}

// firstly clean up the data
	$prefix = preg_replace('/s+/', ' ', $prefix);
	if (strlen($prefix) > 0) {
		$query = sprintf("select search_term, num_results
							from %s
							where binary search_term regexp '^%s'
							limit %d",
						 $this->db_table,
						 mysql_real_escape_string($this->optimize_keywords($prefix)),
						 $this->suggestion_limit);
		$result = mysql_query($query);
		while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($result)) {
			if ($row[1] == 0)
				$row[1] = '';
			else
				$row[1] = number_format($row[1]) . ' result' . ($row[1] != 1 ? 's' : '');
			$arr[] = $row;
		}
	}
	mysql_close($conn);
}
 
/**
 * just small function to optimize search in arabic
 */
function optimize_keywords($keyword){
	return preg_replace('/(Ç|Ã|Â|Å )/U','(Ç|Ã|Â|Å )',$keyword);
}

That's all folks, happy coding !

PS : There is no space in the last regular expression

Update : There is still another thing that I forget to add :

encodeURIComponent() doesnt support all encoding, so just open AjaxACWidgetXMLHttpRequest.class.php and remove all encodeURIComponent() calls

There is another test to be removed in googlesuggestclone.js which is the regular expression the function will be And then you can remove the var gsc_basicmatch.