I am using ASP.NET MVC, MS SQL and IIS. I have a few users that have used Chinese characters in their profile info. However, when I display this information is shows up as æŽå¼·è¯ but they are correct in my database. Currently my UTF for my HTML pages is set to UTF-8. Should I change it to UTF-16? I understand there are a few problems that can come from this but what are my choices?
Thank you,
Aaron
Any UTF coding should work the same in their ability to represent Unicode characters so switching to UTF-16 wouldn't help. There's an encoding issue somewhere and with UTF-16 you would only end up with different wrong HTML representation. Of course if you have some library that simply encodes non-ASCII characters as entities and does support wide characters, your problem may be solved by the switch. There are however characters that need even 2 wide characters and these would still be shown wrong, although users might rarely notice. The best option would be to have whatever is producing the HTML to interpret your UTF-8 correctly.
UTF-8 and UTF-16 encode exactly the same set of characters. It's not that UTF-8 doesn't cover Chinese characters and UTF-16 does. UTF-16 uses uniformly 16 bits to represent a character; while UTF-8 uses 1, 2, or 3 bytes depending on the character, so that an ASCII character is represented still as 1 byte. Start with this Wikipedia article to get the idea behind it.
So, there's little chance switching to UTF-16 will help you at all. There's a chance it makes things worse, as is discussed in the SO question you linked above. There's a problem somewhere else in your setup, which does not correctly take into account non-ASCII or non-Latin-1 characters. Make sure every part of your setup works in UTF-8.