Question

I have a textarea where I type some unicode characters which become question marks by the time the string reaches the server.
On the input I typed the following:

Don’t “quote” me on that.

On the server I checked Request.Form["fieldID"] in Page_Load() and I saw:

“Don�t �quote� me on that.”

I checked my web.config file and it says <globalization requestEncoding="utf-8" responseEncoding="utf-8" />. Anything else I should check to ensure UTF-8 is enabled?

Answer 1

Once I again I solve my own problem. It is quite simple. The short answer is add the following before sending any response back to the client:

Response.ContentType = "text/html; charset=utf-8";

The long answer is that a “feature” called Cache Mode circumvented all other response data by writing a UTF-8 encoded file that is really just a cached response. Adding that line before it write the file solved my problem.

if (cacheModeEnabled) {
    Response.ContentType = "text/html; charset=utf-8"; // WriteFile doesn't know the file encoding
    Response.WriteFile(Server.MapPath("CacheForm.aspx"), true);
    Response.End();
} else {
  // perform normal response here
}

Thanks for all the answers and comments. They definitely helped me solve this issue. Most notably, Fiddler2 let me see what the heck is really in the request and response.