Why does Nominatim return an error for queries from Internet Explorer?

Question

I am doing a request using jQuery:

$.get("http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=" +
      searchValue + "&accept-language=hebformat=json&polygon='true'",
      {}, function (data)

where searchValue is the text string which I want to search for.

With Firefox this works perfectly and I am getting a JSON result and everything running smoothly. My application is nearly finished and I decided to run this on IE but I found that the request takes a lot of time and instead of getting a JSON result I get an error back.

What I can about this?

Accepted Answer

Nominatim expects parameters to be UTF-8 encoded and generates errors if the encoding is invalid.

Firefox correctly encodes parameters using UTF-8 encoding by default, but Internet Explorer doesn't, so you will need to explicitly encode it using the encodeURIComponent function. This will also work in Firefox and should work in other browsers.

$.get("http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=" +
      encodeURIComponent(searchValue) + 
      "&accept-language=he&format=json&polygon=1",
      {}, function (data){});

You should also ensure that your page uses a UTF-8 encoding so that results can be properly displayed. This can be done by adding using a suitable meta tag in your <head> block:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

Why does Nominatim return an error for queries from Internet Explorer?

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