Help! I'm caught in the vortex of Internet Explorer, Javascript 1.1 and Arabic text! 2003

So I'm helping with the implementation of library software for a consortium of major Arabic universities and I've run into a problem. I've got a complex Javascript form which assembles a search string from information the user has typed into various input boxes. This form works in English. It works in Arabic in Mozilla and Netscape 7. In Internet Explorer, for some unknown reason, perfectly good Arabic text - which we can search fine from the simplified search page which doesn't store inputs in an array and then assemble a search string - is transformed from UTF-8 encoding to Unicode. We're going to support Unicode, but didn't think we'd have to do it today.

Does anyone have any idea what's going on? Is Internet Explorer's implementation of Javascript 1.1 somehow weirdly forcing a particular encoding scheme as a side effect of passing data through an array? Arrgggh...

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Help! I'm caught in the vortex of Internet Explorer, Javascript 1.1 and Arabic text!

So I'm helping with the implementation of library software for a consortium of major Arabic universities and I've run into a problem. I've got a complex Javascript form which assembles a search string from information the user has typed into various input boxes. This form works in English. It works in Arabic in Mozilla and Netscape 7. In Internet Explorer, for some unknown reason, perfectly good Arabic text - which we can search fine from the simplified search page which doesn't store inputs in an array and then assemble a search string - is transformed from UTF-8 encoding to Unicode. We're going to support Unicode, but didn't think we'd have to do it today.

Does anyone have any idea what's going on? Is Internet Explorer's implementation of Javascript 1.1 somehow weirdly forcing a particular encoding scheme as a side effect of passing data through an array? Arrgggh...

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