I ran into an issue with ASP.NET pages coming back with the wrong character encoding for text processed through controls.
In the code I specified UTF-8, but when I checked the properties in Firefox the encoding was ISO-8859-1 (Western European (ISO) 28591).
One result of this was that a that had been encoded through a control, such as a LinkButton, was appearing as  (U+00C2 Latin Capital Letter A With Circumflex Alt+0194) followed by the actual non-breaking space.
- non-breaking space character in ISO-8859-1 is byte 0xA0
- non-breaking space character in UTF-8 is byte 0xC2,0xA0
- character bytes 0xC2,0xA0 viewed as ISO-8859-1 comes out as "Â " (where the second character is a non-breaking space).
<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
<title></title>
<script runat="server">
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentType = "Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8";
lnkTest.Text += "1";
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
<p>Before After</p>
<asp:LinkButton ID="lnkTest" runat="server" Text="Before After" />
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
Try changing the content type line as follows:
HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentType = "text/html; charset=UTF-8";
See Also:
