Question

I’m pulling text from an external system (SSAS) and displaying the text in a TableCell in ASP 2.0 (.NET 4). The text is being displayed as £14,243,123.26 (note the  in front of the pound symbol).

My understanding of this is that c# uses UTF-16 (SSAS probably the same since SQL Server does also), and ASP 2.0 will display the pages as UTF-8 which is what is happening. The difference here is probably causing the display issue.

However this issue seems to be generally handled under the hood so I’m wondering why not here? Is it because many controls in ASP automatically encode the strings where as the Table control doesn’t? Using Server.HtmlEncode on the Table seems to work but I’m hoping this isn’t necessary everywhere.

Answer 1

The UTF-8/UTF-16 conversion shouldn’t be a problem. You need to trace exactly where things are going wrong, with diagnostics and with tools:

• Use Wireshark to look at the exact response coming back. You need to check the content type, any charset declarations within the page itself, and the bytes used to represent the £ sign

• At the server, when you’ve fetched the data, dump the exact characters involved, something like this (assuming some appropriate Log.Write method):

  Log.Write("Retrieved string: '{0}' length {1}", text, text.Length);
  foreach (char c in text)
  {
      Log.Write("  Character {0}: U+{1:x4}", c, (int) c);
  }
  

• If you are able to talk to the server from a console app, try that instead, dumping the characters out as per the above. This is likely to make experimentation much simpler than messing around with redeployment and server logs.

Once you’ve worked out exactly where the issue is, you can edit your question to give that information if you can’t work out how to fix it.