Integration Guide

PayPal Payments Standard Integration Guide June 2012 409
HTML Form Basics for PayPal Payments Standard
Variations on Basic Variables
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Variations on Basic Variables
This section highlights a few ways to use PayPal Payments Standard FORM variables.
The HTML variables interact in various ways. Sometimes their effect is cumulative,
sometimes they can cancel each other out, and sometimes a variable requires that you also set
another variable. These interactions are detailed in the descriptions of the variables in
Appendix A, “HTML Variables for PayPal Payments Standard” and Appendix B, “Address
Handling (U.S. Merchants Only).”
Record Keeping with Passthrough Variables
Some variables are exclusively for your own use, such as order management. PayPal returns
the values that you send through Instant Payment Notification exactly as you sent them. For
this reason, they are called passthrough variables. Their values are not recorded or used by
PayPal.
The following are passthrough variables:
 custom
 item_number or item_number_x
 invoice
Setting the Character Set – charset
Use the charset HTML variable to specify the character set and character encoding for the
billing information/log-in page on the PayPal website. In addition, this variable sets the same
values for information that you send to PayPal in your HTML button code.
For example, the following INPUT tag sets the encoding to UTF-8:
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" name="charset" value="utf-8">