Numiko Labs

Following this example on the JQuery docs only got me so far.
I knew that you needed to pass a URL to getJSON() and append a callback parameter to the end of it:

$.getJSON(“http://www.example.com? jsoncallback=?”);

But then what? JQuery will look at the data returned for a call to ‘jsoncallback’ so
to get this to work you’ll need your server side code to return a snippet of JavaScript too.
Wrap the JSON output in a call to ‘jsoncallback’:

jsoncallback ({"name" : "hello world"});

jQuery will replace the questionmark at the end of the URL with this function call which will be executed by the client, so therefore we need to define the jsoncallback function too:

function jsoncallback(data){

// do some stuff with the JSON here!

}

Really just a proof of concept, but pretty handy, eh!

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It’s not as hard as you might have heard. I’ve finally left my cosy ASCII world and it’s not as bad as I thought.

Start with this : http://www.nicknettleton.com/zine/php/php-utf-8-cheatsheet – a checklist of what you need to do.

Good reading here : http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/charsets. See the links at the bottom of this one.

Also added support for sending emails in different character sets in NMC_Email.php and started a library of useful functions in NMC_UTF.php (in repository soon).

Something to watch out for : the AJAX library I was using was escaping parameters it was sending to the server – I stopped it doing this because JavaScript’s escape function doesn’t do it properly. (btw AJAX always sends UTF-8 regardless of the encoding of the page)

I’d recommend going with UTF-8 if there is any doubt that non-latin-1 character sets might be needed in the future. It saves a lot of hassle. I messed around with having parallel sites – one latin 1 for English and one latin 2 for Polish but I needn’t have bothered.

Having all translate-able text in one place to start with also saves time. Otherwise you have to go through all the nooks and crannies of the site to find it.

Good overview of character sets and encoding here : The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)