How did you get ASP.NET to output UTF-16 encoded text?

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+2 Q:

How did you get ASP.NET to output UTF-16 encoded text?

I serialize an object in .NET which by default is UTF-16 format. Now I want to send the string as an output response to an .ashx request.

I get the error: Switch from current encoding to specified encoding not supported. Error processing resource

How do I tell my website or page to use UTF-16 format.

Thanks.

Update: read both answers.

+1 A:

Change the Response.ContentEncoding property to System.Text.Encoding.Unicode?

OJ 2009-02-03 00:35:15

+3 A:

In general: don't.

Web pages as UTF-16 confuse many tools and make browsers behave in odd, unexpected ways. (Esp.: linked scripts, form submissions, proxies). UTF-16 can only be served safely as a binary object, so for web content stick to an encoding that is a superset of ASCII - the obvious choice being UTF-8.

The error you quote is generally what you get when you try to read an XML file whose <?xml encoding="..."?> prolog clashes with the real encoding of the file. None of the superset-of-ASCII encodings ever clash because 'xml encoding' is ASCII and represented the same in all of them, but if you've put encoding="utf-16" in an XML file that's not saved as UTF-16, or you've not put it in when it is, then the parser can't cope with the logical impossibility.

bobince 2009-02-03 02:27:00

Actually I am using the ToXml Extension Method from here: http://solidcoding.blogspot.com/2007/11/c-toxml-extension-method.html .Since System.String is stored internally as UTF-16 that is where my problem is. I will have to use a longer ToXml method that accounts 4 this and converts to UTF-8

tyndall 2009-02-03 05:58:41

Perhaps XmlSerializer.Serialize(Stream, Object) onto a byte stream, rather than (TextWriter, Object) is what's required?

bobince 2009-02-03 10:36:34

@bobince, that is what the examples I saw online showed. Oh well few extra lines of code. thats all.

tyndall 2009-02-03 16:24:16

Not exactly how I wrote it, but close enough: http://blog.newslacker.net/2008/02/net-xml-serialization.html and I used UTF8

tyndall 2009-02-03 16:56:19

That example too is using the TextWriter. I haven't tried it, but it seems to me like the method accepting a Stream instead should be byte-oriented and hence not produce a spurious 'encoding="UTF-16"'.

bobince 2009-02-03 17:47:47

ansaurus

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How did you get ASP.NET to output UTF-16 encoded text?

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