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Asked: 2026-05-10T16:39:48+00:00

There doesn’t seem to be an accepted way of sending down a header parameter

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There doesn’t seem to be an accepted way of sending down a header parameter in non ascii format.

The header for file download usually looks like

Content-disposition: attachment; filename=’theasciifilename.doc’

Except if you smash a utf8 encoded string in the filename parameter, Firefox will handle it fine, whereas IE will throw up.

There is a document on CodeProject that explains a method for encoding the filename.

This document encodes Bản Kiểm Kê.doc to B%e1%ba%a3n%20Ki%e1%bb%83m%20K%c3%aa.doc by hex encoding the bytes.

Problem #1: the first character in that string: ả has a value of ả — encode that number in Hex and you get %a3%1e. How did this guy get %e1%ba%a3? (I’m obviously missing something simple here)

Problem #2: While IE acknowledges this encoding, Firefox doesn’t! What to do?

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1 Answer

  1. Answer to question #1: You are confusing Unicode and UTF-8. The hex value of ‘ả’ is 0xA31E however that is not a UTF-8 character. In UTF-8 that character requries three bytes, 0xE1 0xBA 0xA3. URL encoding is poorly defined for non-ascii encodings but %e1%ba%a3 is the valid UTF-8 encoding to use for that character.

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