Question

I have a web app that creates some HTML as a String and uploads the String as a file to Amazon S3.

Checking the String in the debugger right before the file is uploaded I see the HTML looks fine but when I check the file in the bucket I see some characters have changed. It only happens to certain characters. For example:

It’s GO time on Android™!

becomes

It’s GO time on Android™!

This is the exact code I use:

using (var client = AWSClientFactory.CreateAmazonS3Client(accessKey, secretKey, s3Config))
        {
            var request = new PutObjectRequest()
                .WithBucketName(bucketName)
                .WithKey(fileKey)
                .WithMetaData("title", title);
            request.ContentBody = body;
            S3Response response = client.PutObject(request);
            response.Dispose();
        }

I tried .WithContentBody(body) but changed it to request.ContentBody = body; to see if that would magically work but obviously it didn’t.

The body variable is the HTML String. When I view it in the Debugger the characters look as they should. Also when I use the Visual Studio HTML viewer for the body value it looks fine.

Any idea what I could be doing wrong here? Am I missing some setting? Can’t seem to find any body else with this problem in my web searches.

Answer 1

Finally figured this one out. Didn’t spot it sooner because the HTML string I had in the debugger was rendering OK in browsers but it should have been obvious I guess.

I have to encode special characters before transporting them. I couldn’t use the standard HttpUtility to encode the entire HTML string because all the HTML tags would get encoded.

I used this method:

private static string HtmlEncodeSpecialChars(string html)
    {
        var sb = new StringBuilder();
        foreach (var c in html)
        {
            if (c > 127) // special chars
                sb.Append(String.Format("&#{0};", (int)c));
            else
                sb.Append(c);
        }
        return sb.ToString();
    }

which I saw here.

Seems to be doing the trick so far.