Method for detecting current client-side browser encoding

• US 20040205673A1
• Filed: 09/22/2001
• Published: 10/14/2004
• Est. Priority Date: 09/22/2001
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Vladimir Patryshev
• Original Assignee: Vladimir Patryshev
• Inventors: Patryshev, Vladimir
• Application Number:
  US09/682,576
• Publication Number:
  US 20040205673A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 715/536
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/126 Character encoding
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/02 based on web technology, e.g. hypertext transfer protocol [HTTP]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 69/329 in the application layer [OSI layer 7]

Abstract

In order to make the world wide web pages adaptable to the user language and encoding, a method is provided such that the current encoding set on the client browser can be detected within the page being browsed, making it possible to feed-back the encoding to the server side, and also to adapt the page to the language that is most likely to match the native language of the user. To provide this, sample Unicode strings are matched against encoding-specific string values, which are selected in such a way that the match uniquely determines the encoding being currently set. Ordinarily users around the world do not change this setting and often are not aware of it. When the forms are passed back to the server, knowing the encoding of the form data makes it possible to correctly parse the form data and pass them correctly to search engines, to databases, or to other servers.

Claims

1. A method for detecting character set (also known as character encoding) currently selected on the browser on the world wide web client computer system, comprising:

a sample Unicode string that contains a set of test character codes which is independent of current client encoding;

a plurality of instructions comparing parts of sample Unicode strings with characters or sequences of characters directly encoded using various encodings to be detected;

a function that returns the currently selected encoding.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the scripting programming language comprises a JavaScript programming language.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the detection is done in three consecutive steps:

detection of Utf encodings;

detection of multi-byte language encodings;

detection of single-byte language encodings.

4. The method of accompanying the form data sent from the web client to the web server with the encoding information collected using method of claim 1.

5. The method of correct form data conversion on the server side based on the accompanying encoding information collected using method of claim 1.