Chinese characters in an InfoPath browser form submitted to a web service appear as question marks

Question

I have a web service that submits InfoPath forms to a workflow. When I submit a form from the browser, Chinese characters entered into text boxes or rich text boxes are passed to the service as question marks. The service exposes two methods: one that takes the form as an XML string and another that takes it as an XML document. The problem occurs with both.The problem does not occur when submitting a form from the InfoPath application; nor does it occur if I use the browser to manually create and save a form to the SharePoint library. Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

You don't provide enough detail to diagnose properly, but clearly you've got a problem where the wrong encoding is being used. Check the encoding of the browser form page; it should match the encoding expected by the receiving script. If you want to support Chinese and other characters, that encoding needs to be either one of the legacy Chinese encodings, or (much better idea) UTF-8.