Character encoding problem in Ajax request

Simplified example of my problem code:


function search(){

var search = document.getElementById('searchstring').value;
xmlHttp=GetXmlHttpObject()

if (xmlHttp==null)
{
alert ("Browser does not support HTTP Request")
return
}
var url="search.php"
url=url+"?string="+search
url=url+"&sid="+Math.random()
xmlHttp.onreadystatechange=stateChanged
xmlHttp.open("GET",url,true)
xmlHttp.send(null)
}


search.php
Code:

<?php header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
$searchstring = mysql_escape_string($_GET['string']);
echo $searchstring;
?>

In firefox everything works fine, but in Internet Explorer if I send a searchvalue like öööööö, it echos this �� . If I put $searchstring = utf8_encode($searchstring); in search.php, then it works in Explorer, but of course not in firefox. What would be a good way to fix this.

you can try this on the search.php


<?PHP
//Drop the header as it is NOT required:
echo urldecode($searchstring);

Thanks for the suggestion, but it did not help.

The fix was so simple :)

var search = encodeURIComponent(document.getElementById('searchstring').value);