web3.toAscii for foreign languages

Question

I have a function that takes bytes32 _name as a parameter and store it in a struct.

Let's say _name is either Chinese, Korean, or Japanese and from app.js I would convert the _name to hex to pass it to the function.

App.contracts.Test.deployed().then(function(instance) {
            return instance.storeName(web3.toHex(name), { from: account });

Now, when I retrieve the name by calling the function and convert it using web3.toAscii

App.contracts.Test.deployed().then(function(instance) {                 
        return instance.getStruct.call();
    }).then(function(result) {

var name = web3.toAscii(result[1]);

the value would look like ÁÁ8È. Is it something that web3.toAscii cannot handle other languages or should I just use string _name?

Answer 1

The red flag here is of course that you are using web3.toAscii to convert Chinese, Korean, etc. Ascii by default is restricted to the English language.

Solidity supports utf-8 and yes you can get and read names which are in utf-8 encoding (which allows non-English characters). The solution is to encode into utf-8 and then rest is all covered by web3.

var chinese_string = '你好'; //hello var chinese_string_utf_encoded = '\xE4\xBD\xA0\xE5\xA5\xBD'; //checkout utf-8js

web3.toHex(a_utf_encoded); //returns "0xe4bda0e5a5bd"

Now use web3.toUtf8 to decode it back to the original Chinese text.

web3.toUtf8("0xe4bda0e5a5bd"); //returns "你好"