How to make IE post FORM data in UTF-8?

Question

This is continuation of this question: Java Jersey: Receive form parameter as byte array

I need form data to be posted in UTF-8 even if containing page uses ISO-8859-1 c

Answer 1

Ruby on rails applications use this trick: they add in an hidden field an UTF-8 character that cannot be coerced into ISO Latin 1.

The field they use is

<input name="utf8" type="hidden" value="&#x2713;" />

and it ends up in the query parameters as

search?param1=foo&param2=bar&utf8=✓

History note: before utf8=✓, Ruby on rails used a fancy snowman to force UTF-8: http://intertwingly.net/blog/2010/07/29/Rails-and-Snowmen.