Member Avatar for Acute

How to send ANY text via jquery ajax method to php script?

When text entered in textarea is html entity, php $_POST[]/$_GET[] sees it as empty string.

Here is the code:

<head>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="/Engine/js/jquery-1.4.4.min.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript">
		$(document).ready(function(){
			$("button").click(function(){
				$.ajax({
					type: "GET",
					url: "get.php",
					data: "ta=" + $("#ta").val(),
					success: function(data){
						alert(data);
					}
				});
			});
		});
	</script>
</head>

<body>
		<textarea id="ta"></textarea>
		<button>Send it</button>
</body>

and the get.php:

<?php
	echo $_GET['ta'];
?>

type in textarea "&lt;b&gt;dog&lt;/b&gt;", press the button and empty string will be alerted. Why and how to fix it so that every text will be successfuly delivered to php script?

Thnx in advance

  • 2 Contributors
  • 4 Replies
  • 180 Views
  • 15 Hours Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by McLaren

Dani AI

Generated

Short version: the problem is an unencoded ampersand. HTML entities like "&lt;" start with a literal "&", and when you build a raw query string by concatenation that ampersand is treated as a parameter separator, so PHP sees ta as empty. As discovered, giving jQuery a data object works because jQuery URL-encodes values before sending.

Why it breaks: an application/x-www-form-urlencoded string uses & to split name=value pairs. If the value contains & (or =, +, ?, #, spaces, etc.) and you don't percent-encode it, the server will parse the pieces as separate parameters.

Practical fixes (pick one):

  • Encode the value yourself before concatenating:

    data: "ta=" + encodeURIComponent(document.getElementById('ta').value)

  • Let jQuery build/encode the string for you:

    data: $.param({ ta: $('#ta').val() })

  • Or pass an object to data (what you already tried) — jQuery will URL-encode automatically for GET or POST.

Extra tips: prefer POST for large blobs (GET URLs have practical length limits). Avoid double-encoding: don’t pre-encode if jQuery will encode again. Always sanitize/escape on output (to prevent XSS) and, when debugging, inspect the raw request (for example $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] or logging php://input) so you can see exactly what the server received.

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Member Avatar for McLaren

with post for me it works

$(document).ready(function(){
			$("button").click(function(){
				
				$.ajax({
					type: "post",
					url: "http://localhost/ubagynas/test/testas",
					
					data: {ta: $("#ta").val()},
					success: function(data){
						alert(data);
					}
				});
			});
		});
Member Avatar for Acute

how abt GET? have you tried GET?

Member Avatar for Acute

Hey, I've got it. Actually it is very strange, but the problem was

data: "ta=" + $("#ta").val()

in this way when you input in textarea "&lt;b&gt;dog&lt;/b&gt;" it alerts nothing.

However when I use

data: {ta: $("#ta").val()}

everythings works fine! :]

Thnx!

Member Avatar for McLaren

cool :) I was lazy to try with get, because I tried on codeigniter framework, and in it if you want $_get, you have to configure something :)

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