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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-02T12:00:30+00:00

My .NET ASMX webservice is accepting requests from a client I don’t have direct

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My .NET ASMX webservice is accepting requests from a client I don’t have direct control over. It’s sending a request that looks like this:

POST /Service.asmx HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Length: 1382
Content-Type: text/xml
Accept: text/xml
Host: localhost
User-Agent: Borland SOAP 1.1
SOAPAction: "http://domain.com/InsertRecords"

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope... <v>ÄLMÅ BÄCK</v></SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

In my WebMethod, the string ÄLMÅ BÄCK gets munged to ??LM?? B??CK — typical encoding mess-up.

In my testing I’ve found that if I simply tweak the content-type header, all is well:

Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8

Why is .NET choosing an encoding other than utf-8 when it’s unspecified, and is there any way I can coerce this ASMX to use UTF-8 encoding?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The following code run before the web service handler is invoked resulted in the HTTP Request correctly decoded:

    if (HttpContext.Current.Request.ContentType == "text/xml") {
    HttpContext.Current.Request.ContentType = "text/xml; charset=UTF-8";
}

    This feels a bit hacky, but I believe it’ll work well for my circumstances. I’m still very interested in some background information on why this was an issue at all, and if there’s a better way to pull this off (besides getting the client to be more explicit about the encoding).

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