Webmaster Forum / HTML, CSS, Scripts / JavaScript / December 2004

The PHP script needs to send UTF-8 encoded text so I am not sure what
you are trying to achieve with setRequestHeader on the client.

I do not speak Greek so I am relying on babelfish for this. It
translates English
Who is god?
to the following:
Ποιος είναι Θεός;

Now assuming you are encoding your PHP pages as ISO-8859-7 which is an
8-bit encoding allowing you to use Latin letters and Greek letters you
could send your XML as ISO-8859-7 and then rely on the XML parser to
decode that. As said XML parsers do not need to understand that encoding
but my tests here with MSXML/IE 6, Mozilla and with Opera 8.00 beta show
they do understand that.
I have used the following PHP test page encoded as ISO-8859-7:

<?php
$text = 'Ποιος είναι Θεός;';
$xmlSource = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-7"?>' . "\r\n";
$xmlSource .= '<text xml:lang="gr">' . $text . '</text>';
header('Content-Type: application/xml');
echo $xmlSource;
?>

Then client-side script reads the XML sent as follows:

function getText (url, callback) {
  var httpRequest;
  if (typeof XMLHttpRequest != 'undefined') {
    httpRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();
  }
  else if (typeof ActiveXObject != 'undefined') {
    httpRequest = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');
  }
  if (httpRequest) {
    httpRequest.open('GET', url, true);
    httpRequest.onreadystatechange = function () {
      if (httpRequest.readyState == 4 && httpRequest.responseXML) {
        var xmlDocument = httpRequest.responseXML;
        if (xmlDocument.documentElement &&
xmlDocument.documentElement.firstChild) {
          callback(xmlDocument.documentElement.firstChild.nodeValue);
        }
      }
    };
    httpRequest.send(null);
  }
}

function insertTextIntoBody (text) {
  var p;
  if (document.createElement && (p = document.createElement('p'))) {
    p.appendChild(document.createTextNode(text));
    document.body.appendChild(p);
  }
}

getText('test2004123101.php', insertTextIntoBody);

and then the tested browsers show

Ποιος είναι Θεός;

in the HTML page.

Or use the PHP extension iconv if you have that available
  http://de3.php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php
to convert your 8-bit PHP strings to UTF-8 as needed.

I had a similar problem not long ago.
i past again some php code which should help you.

<?php
$xmlString = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>' . "\r\n";
$xmlString .=
'<root><text xml:lang="de">Umlaute: ä, ö, ü</text></root>';
header('Content-Type: application/xml');
echo utf8_encode($xmlString);
?>

As you can see the xml string is build also manually, but is utf8
encoded before echoed.

In the Javascript again, you can access the responseXML object with the
normal W3C DOM Methods.

Have a look a this page for a good intro:
http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/intro.html