Richard Olsson Freelance Flash developer

It seems the AMFPHP module for drupal is messing up strings as it sends them over to the client. I recently found this "bug" (and fixed it) when I was working on a Swedish site and needed correctly encoded unicode text.

As it turns out, AMFPHP (the Drupal module) tells AMFPHP (the framework) to convert the encoding of all strings, incorrectly assuming that the database content is encoded using ISO-8859-1. Of course, Drupal stores all data as UTF-8 and that is also the encoding that should be retained all the way through PHP, AMF, and into the Flash TextField on the client side.

Judging by the current rate of updates and contributions to the AMFPHP module (last checked into HEAD in April this year) we might have to wait for an official fix. In the meantime, luckily, we can fix it ourselves.

On lines 46 through 50 in amfphp.module (wrong line numbers below) is the code to initialize the AMFPHP framework. The fix is as easy as commenting out line 49, like so:

$gateway = new AmfphpGateway();
$gateway->setClassPath($servicesPath);
$gateway->setClassMappingsPath($voPath); 
/* Don't decode, since Drupal default is already UTF-8
$gateway->setCharsetHandler("utf8_decode","ISO-8859-1","ISO-8859-1");
*/
$gateway->setErrorHandling(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE);

It would probably be safer to check in some way which encoding is being used in the database, but ignoring character set conversion entirely like this does the trick if we know that our databases are UTF-8 (as should always be the case with Drupal.)