Integration Guide

Table Of Contents
Website Payments Standard Integration Guide September 2008 339
HTML Form Basics for Website Payments Standard
Variations on Basic Variables
11
this reason, they are called passthrough variables. Their values are not recorded or used by
PayPal.
The following are passthrough variables:
z custom
z item_number or item_number_x
z invoice
Setting the Character Set – charset
You can use the charset HTML variable to specify the character set or character encoding of
the data you collect in your website forms and send to PayPal. PayPal sends data to you in the
same character set or encoding you specify with the charset variable. For example, the
following INPUT tag sets the encoding to UTF-8:
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" name="charset" value="utf-8">
Setting The Return URL on Individual Transactions
With Auto Return turned on in your account profile, you can set the value of the return URL
on each individual transaction to override the value that you have stored on PayPal. For
example, you might want to return the payers browser to a URL on your site that is specific to
that payer, perhaps with a session ID or other transaction-related data included in the URL.
To set the return URL for a transaction, include the return variable in the HTML FORM:
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="return" value="URLspecificToThisTransaction">
T
ABLE 11.2 Character Sets and Encoding Schemes Supported by PayPal
Big5 (Traditional
Chinese in Taiwan)
EUC-JP
EUC-KR
EUC-TW
gb2312 (Simplified
Chinese)
gbk
HZ-GB-2312
(Traditional
Chinese in Hong
Kong)
ibm-862 (Hebrew
with European
characters)
ISO-2022-CN
ISO-2022-JP
ISO-2022-KR
ISO-8859-1
(Western
European
Languages)
ISO-8859-2
ISO-8859-3
ISO-8859-4
ISO-8859-5
ISO-8859-6
ISO-8859-7
ISO-8859-8
ISO-8859-9
ISO-8859-13
ISO-8859-15
KOI8-R
(Cyrillic)
Shift_JIS
UTF-7
UTF-8
UTF-16
UTF-16BE
UTF-16LE
UTF16_Platfor
mEndian
UTF16_Oppos
iteEndian
UTF-32
UTF-32BE
UTF-32LE
UTF32_Platfor
mEndian
UTF32_Oppos
iteEndian
US-ASCII
windows-1250
windows-1251
windows-1252
windows-1253
windows-1254
windows-1255
windows-1256
windows-1257
windows-1258
windows-874
(Thai)
windows-949
(Korean)
x-mac-greek
x-mac-turkish
x-mac-
centraleurroman
x-mac-cyrillic
ebcdic-cp-us
ibm-1047