Question

I have an ajax form created with the html helper: @using (Ajax.BeginForm(...))

The problem is when I post some characters like ñ, €, etc they are encoded as ñ -> ñ, €-> ⬠when they are received by the controller.

I already have this section in my Web.config:

<globalization enableClientBasedCulture="true" uiCulture="auto" culture="auto" fileEncoding="iso-8859-15" requestEncoding="iso-8859-15" responseEncoding="iso-8859-15" />

which solved previous encoding problems when passing special characters in urls.

How can I get this problem fixed so I can receive that characters in my controller?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

The thing is that AJAX uses the UTF-8 encoding when it sends the request. But you have configured your server to expect requestEncoding="iso-8859-15" which is where the discrepancy comes from.

Let’s suppose that you have an input field named Category in your form and the user enters the ñ character in it. If you use a normal Html.BeginForm the following POST request payload will be sent to the server:

Category=%F1

On the other hand if you use an Ajax.BeginForm, the following request POST payload will be sent to the server:

Category=%C3%B1&X-Requested-With=XMLHttpRequest

In this case the server is not capable of properly decoding this UTF-8 encoded request because it expects requests to be iso-8859-15 encoded.

So you could modify your web.config to use UTF-8 request and response encoding for your site. Can’t think of a valid reason in 2012 to use any other encoding than UTF-8 in a web application.

<globalization 
    enableClientBasedCulture="true" 
    uiCulture="auto" 
    culture="auto" 
    fileEncoding="utf-8" 
    requestEncoding="utf-8" 
    responseEncoding="utf-8" 
/>

Also don’t forget to update any <meta> tags that you might have in your layouts in order to use UTF-8 as well:

<meta charset="utf-8" />