This snippet explains how to fix Internet Explorer and Firefox form encoding issues when posting data to a server having a different encoding than the source system.

This happens, for example, when you host a form on a server using ISO-8859-1 that posts data to a server using UTF-8.

The fix for Firefox (and Opera and other sensible browsers) is to use the accept-charset attribute:

   1  <form ...  accept-charset="utf-8">

The fix for Internet Explorer is to use a hack:

   1  <form ...  accept-charset="utf-8">
   2    <input type="hidden" name="enc" value="&#153;">
   3  </form>

The hidden input field will make Internet Explorer understand that you want it to support UTF-8.