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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-08T20:29:41+00:00

I have a page in ASP.net (VB) that I’m serving via IIS. The page

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I have a page in ASP.net (VB) that I’m serving via IIS.

The page is basically a translation of the uk site.

I have:

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

at the top of the code, and all the characters show ok in the code.

however in (all) browsers many of the special polish characters, such as ‘Ł’ are missing, replaced directly with ‘L’.

Is this an IIS thing? or could it be something else?

ETA: I just noticed that the polish text portion drawn out of the SQL database is being displayed correctly within the same page..! Odd!

Further edit:
I have found the basic source of the issue, I think, but not a solution:
The areas that are not showing properly are headers and footers, which are imported into the page via Server Side Include.
It seams some sort of encoding is being lost in this import / injection.
Should the imported file have some sort of encoding header?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This sounds like a problem with encoding in your static content files. The content-type <meta> has no bearing on the actual physical encoding of the file. I have a suspicion the file is saved in Codepage 1252 instead of UTF-8.

    I suggest you open your *.aspx files (where I assume you’re storing the problematic Polish text) in a text editor that supports different encodings (such as VS or Notepad2. Not WordPad or Windows Notepad). Force-save the file with UTF-8 encoding (in VS, go File > Advanced Save Options and ensure “Unicode (UTF-8 with signature)” is selected). Then access your site again.

    Also ensure that the Content-Type HTTP header is also correctly set to UTF-8.

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