Classic Asp to Asp.Net urlEncoding problem

Question

I'm using a web service for passing information from a bunch of old .asp pages to a database. Problem is that using httpGet, I need to encode the info so it can be safely passed.

Everything works like a dream, save for the fact that scandinavian letters such as ä ö and å for example come out as squares. Now I don't even know whether this has to do with the company IIS language settings (can't touch them) or something, but I'm wondering if there's a way to force the asp-page to use a specific encoding, and then force the asp.net web service to decode with the same character-set, without any kind of server settings inbetween getting the chance to mix it all up?

I tried to look around, but didn't find any clear-cut examples of exactly how you can do this. Please keep the replies simple, I'm just a beginner on internship here. Thanks for the help!

Edit: Apologies. Didn't include the code because it was so simple I didn't think it'd reveal anything anyway. Here:

.asp

function loginfo()
   Dim text
   text = "ääböö"
   text = Server.URLENCODE(text)

   message = "http://server1/logger_webservice/service.asmx/test_Event?" & _
      "userID=" & userID
   Set objRequest = Server.createobject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP")

   With objRequest
   .open "GET", message, False
   .setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "text/xml"
   .send
   End With

   loginfo = objRequest.responseText
end function

web server:

<WebMethod()> _
Public Function test_Event(ByVal userId As String) As Boolean
   Dim kirj As StreamWriter
   kirj = File.CreateText("C:\Inetpub\server1\Logger_WebService\test_logEvent.txt")

   userId = Server.UrlDecode(userId)

   kirj.WriteLine("userId = " & userId)
   kirj.Close()
   kirj.Dispose()
End Function

Anyway, thanks for help. I'll be looking into this more but as usual, stress and rush is forcing me to move on. I wrote a simple code to encrypt the most used scandinavian letters manually, and decrypted them in the web server. Works fine so far, I just hope there aren't any complications alter on. Just wanted the basic Finnish letters ä, ö and å anyway. :)

I just thought there was some easy method to force the encoding to a specific charset that I just couldn't find. Tend to be terrible at finding information on my own.

Answer 1

Without digging into the code, I cannot give you a "here it is on line X" answer, but the issue you are dealing with is one of encoding. There are multiple ways of encoding strings, from ASCII to UTF-8 to full blown Unicode. What this means is Ifforcing full unicode encoding might solve your problem.

To do this, you can explicitly create your streams (and/or readers/writers) with an encoding. The method is different for different types of objects, and not knowing your code, I cannot give you an explicit answer.

With ASP, you may still be getting garbage, however. And, it has been so long since I played with classic ASP, I would have to dig to get an answer there. Fortunately, it sounds like you have a way to test the ASP to ensure the correct characters are coming through, so test. If it works, focus on the web service.

Answer 2

This recent question that I asked sheds further light on this type of issue with UrlEncoding:

/questions/696659/why-is-this-appearing-in-my-c-strings-194163

It may prove useful to yourself or others hitting this problem.