Home/ Questions/Q 255723
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-11T21:57:16+00:00

We’ve got a page which posts data to our ASP.NET app in ISO-8859-1 <head>

  • 0

We’ve got a page which posts data to our ASP.NET app in ISO-8859-1

<head>
    <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
    <title>`Sample Search Invoker`</title>
</head>
<body>

<form name="advancedform" method="post" action="SearchResults.aspx">
    <input class="field" name="SearchTextBox" type="text" />
    <input class="button" name="search" type="submit" value="Search &gt;" />
</form>

and in the code behind (SearchResults.aspx.cs)

System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection postedValues = Request.Form;
String nextKey;
for (int i = 0; i < postedValues.AllKeys.Length; i++)
{
    nextKey = postedValues.AllKeys[i];

    if (nextKey.Substring(0, 2) != "__")
    {
        // Get basic search text
        if (nextKey.EndsWith(XAEConstants.CONTROL_SearchTextBox))
        {
            // Get search text value
            String sSentSearchText = postedValues[i];

            System.Text.Encoding iso88591 = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1");
            System.Text.Encoding utf8 = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8;

            byte[] abInput = iso88591.GetBytes(sSentSearchText);

            sSentSearchText = utf8.GetString(System.Text.Encoding.Convert(iso88591, utf8, abInput));

            this.SearchText = sSentSearchText.Replace('<', ' ').Replace('>',' ');
            this.PreviousSearchText.Value = this.SearchText;
        }
    }
}

When we pass through Merkblätter it gets pulled out of postedValues[i] as Merkbl�tter
The raw string string is Merkbl%ufffdtter

Any ideas?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You have this line of code:-

    String sSentSearchText = postedValues[i];

    The decoding of octets in the post has happen here.

    The problem is that META http-equiv doesn’t tell the server about the encoding.

    You could just add RequestEncoding=”ISO-8859-1″ to the @Page directive and stop trying to fiddle around with the decoding yourself (since its already happened).

    That doesn’t help either. It seems you can only specify the Request encoding in the web.config.

    Better would be to stop using ISO-8859-1 altogether and leave it with the default UTF-8 encoding. I can see no gain and only pain with using a restrictive encoding.

    Edit

    If it seems that changing the posting forms encoding is not a possibility then we seem to be left with no alternative than to handle the decoding ourselves. To that end include these two static methods in your receiving code-behind:-

    private static NameValueCollection GetEncodedForm(System.IO.Stream stream, Encoding encoding)
{
    System.IO.StreamReader reader = new System.IO.StreamReader(stream, Encoding.ASCII);
    return GetEncodedForm(reader.ReadToEnd(), encoding);
}


private static NameValueCollection GetEncodedForm(string urlEncoded, Encoding encoding)
{
    NameValueCollection form = new NameValueCollection();
    string[] pairs = urlEncoded.Split("&".ToCharArray(), StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

    foreach (string pair in pairs)
    {
        string[] pairItems = pair.Split("=".ToCharArray(), 2, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
        string name = HttpUtility.UrlDecode(pairItems[0], encoding);
        string value = (pairItems.Length > 1) ? HttpUtility.UrlDecode(pairItems[1], encoding) : null;
        form.Add(name, value);
    }
    return form;
}

    Now instead of assigning:-

    postedValues = Request.Form;

    use:-

    postValues = GetEncodedForm(Request.InputStream, Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1"));

    You can now remove the encoding marlarky from the rest of the code.

    • 0