Sugar modifies textareas

[dkelly]

I've noticed strange behaviour with Sugar and textareas. Sugar adds a odd character in front of any £ (GBP) symbol in text areas.

Consider this code:

<?php

$val = $_REQUEST['test'];
for($i = 0; $i < strlen($val); $i++)
{
	var_dump(substr($val, $i, 1));
}

?>

<form method='post' action='/modules/test/test.php'>

  <input type='submit'/>
  <textarea name='test'></textarea>

</form>

If I navigate to /index.php?module=test&action=test and type a GBP symbol into the texarea and submit I get this result:

string(1) "�"
string(1) "�"

ie two chars, the first being some strange hidden one.

If I now navigate to /modules/test/test.php and do the same thing I get

string(1) "£"

The action of the form is the php script itself instead of the page handler to avoid Sugar's request cleaning code and eliminate the possibility of the data being manipulated after the post.

So, it seems that somehow the value of the textarea is being changed by Sugar before the form is submitted. (Some javascript thing I suspect) This is causing problems with my custom modules. What's the solution?

[dkelly]

Anyone from the Sugar Team able to comment on this?

[dkelly]

Some more info about this. If I do a:

 echo file_get_contents("php://input"); 
  

at the beginning of the target file then I get this result:

 test=%C2%A3 
  

which indicates that the raw post data received by PHP does, in fact, have a %C2 (Â) character inserted before the £ sign. Since php://input is read only this means that the POST data must be being altered by Sugar before the actual POST.

What text validation / manipulation javascript is done on forms?

[SugarDev.net]

Very interesting, and a bit disturbing...Unfortunately, I'm not very good at javascript. But I would like this sorted out as well.