How to avoid browsers Unicode normalization when submitting a form with Unicode

Question

When rendering the following Unicode text in HTML, it turns out that the browser (Google Chrome) do some form of Unicode normalization when posting the data back to the server.

Answer 1

It is possible to avoid the string normalization by sending a Uint8Array rather than a string. First, get the UTF-8 data of your string as a Uint8Array as described here by @Moshev:

function utf8AbFromStr(str) {
    var strUtf8 = unescape(encodeURIComponent(str));
    var ab = new Uint8Array(strUtf8.length);
    for (var i = 0; i < strUtf8.length; i++) {
        ab[i] = strUtf8.charCodeAt(i);
    }
    return ab;
}

Then you can POST that Uint8Array with plain XHR or your favorite Ajax library. If you're using jQuery, keep in mind that you need to specify processData: false to prevent jQuery from trying to stringify it and undoing all of your hard work.