Latest posts for the topic "I have problems using the webservice with blanks and special characters"

I have problems using the webservice with blanks and special characters

marc — GMT

Question : The geocoding webservice does not work with special character like ö or blanks. Answer : The parameters for the webservices have to be utf8 url encoded. If you call the webservice with "New York" you have to url encode "New York", otherwise our service will search for "New" and all other parameters afterwards get lost. "New York" becomes "New%20York" and instead of ö use %C3%B6. URL Encoding replaces spaces with "+" signs, and unsafe ASCII characters with "%" followed by their hex equivalent. Safe characters are defined in RFC2396. They are the 7-bit ASCII alphanumerics and the mark characters "-_.!~*'()". Check the documentation of your programming language to see how url encoding is done in your programming language. Java example : java.net.UrlEncoder("ö","UTF8"); Perl : use URI::Escape; $escapedParameter = uri_escape_utf8("new york"); javascript example : encodeURIComponent("ö") (Note that the standard JavaScript escape and unescape functions operate slightly differently: they encode space as "%20", and treat "+" as a safe character.) Pyton : Nicolas Laurance has written a client library for geonames : http://www.zindep.com/blog-zindep/Geoname-python/

Re:I have problems using the webservice with blanks and special characters

zeman — GMT

I'm using utf8_encode in php to encode strings. It works fine most of the time but I'm getting the occasional odd results like the following when searching for Ryūō Japan... http://ws.geonames.org/search?name_equals=Ry%u016B%u014D&country=JP&fcode=ppl&fcode=pplc&fcode=ppla&style=full

Re:I have problems using the webservice with blanks and special characters

marc — GMT

Only utf8 encoding is not sufficient. It also needs to be url encoded. Something like this : rawurlencode(utf8_encode($input)) The result should look like this : http://dev.geonames.org/search?name_equals=Ry%C5%AB%C5%8D Regards Marc

I have problems using the webservice with blanks and special characters

Kristian — GMT

Hallo

marc wrote:

Perl : use URI::Escape; $escapedParameter = uri_escape("new york");

Point your browser to CPAN uri_escape_utf8() is available for UTF-8 url encoding in newer versions of URI::Escape. It's needed (and nice to use) if the Page where the user typed in the search query uses ISO-8859-1. Regards Kristian EDIT: See also please excuse my bad english...

Re:I have problems using the webservice with blanks and special characters

marc — GMT

Thanks, Kristian. I have updated the posting.

Re:I have problems using the webservice with blanks and special characters

PhilBo — GMT

In Ruby: require 'cgi' CGI.escape('new york')

Re:I have problems using the webservice with blanks and special characters

eyeRmonkey — GMT

In PHP, I am using this: Code:

$encoding = mb_detect_encoding($query);
if($encoding == 'UTF-8') {
	$query_escaped = urlencode($query);
} else {
	$query_escaped = urlencode(utf8_encode($query));
}

It's probably not the best way to go about it, but it works whether you are using UTF-8 for your php files themselves or not.

Re:I have problems using the webservice with blanks and special characters

eyeRmonkey — GMT

I came up with a better way to accomplish this without using the mbstring library: Code:

if(is_unicode($query)) {
	$query_escaped = urlencode($query);
} else {
	$query_escaped = urlencode(utf8_encode($query));
}

Re:I have problems using the webservice with blanks and special characters

bruno bernardino — GMT

Hi, I'm having problems with the ' character (single quote)... The URL I'm getting is http://ws.geonames.org/search?name_equals=Bassin%20d%27Arcachon&country=FR&maxRows=30&style=FULL&lang=fr The GeoName is Bassin d'Arcachon, I'm using php like this: Code:

$xml = simplexml_load_file("http://ws.geonames.org/search?name_equals=".rawurlencode(utf8_encode(stripslashes($loc)))."&country=$cp&maxRows=30&style=FULL&lang=fr");

where $loc is utf8-decoded and rawurldecoded already. Does any of you have this problem? This is the location: http://www.geonames.org/3037252/bassin-d-arcachon.html

Re:I have problems using the webservice with blanks and special characters

marc — GMT

Hi Bruno This was a problem on our side with the name_equals parameter. I have fixed it. Thanks for having reported it. Cheers Marc

Re:I have problems using the webservice with blanks and special characters

jasonj — GMT

i seem to be having a similiar issue with Goiás Brazil http://ws.geonames.org/searchJSON?q=goi%E3%A1s%20brazil&maxRows=10&style=FULL returns no results but http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=Goiás+Brazil&country= does.

Re:I have problems using the webservice with blanks and special characters

marc — GMT

your encoding for the json service does not look correct. It should be "Goi%C3%A1s" instead of "goi%E3%A1s". Best Marc