Debugging ASP.NET Strings Downloaded to Browser (Montréal instead of Montréal)

Question

I'm downloading a vCard to the browser using Response.Write to output .NET strings with special accented characters. Mime type is text/x-vcard and French characters are appearing wrong in Outlook, for example Montréal;Québec .NET string shows as Montréal Québec in browser.

Apparently vCard default format is ASCII. .NET strings are Unicode UTF-16.

I'm using this vCard generator code from CodeProject.com

I've played with the System.Encoding sample code at the bottom of this linked MSDN page to convert the unicode string into bytes and then write the ascii bytes but then I get Montr?al Qu?bec (progress but not a win). Also I've tried setting content type to both us-ascii and utf-8 of the response.

If I open the downloaded vCard in Windows Notepad and save it as ANSI text (instead of default unicode format) and open in Outlook it's okay. So my assumption is I need to cause download of ANSI charset but am unsure if I'm doing it wrong or have a misunderstanding of where to start.

Update: Looking at the raw HTTP, it appears my French characters are being downloaded in the unexpected format so it looks like I need to do some work on the server side... (full size)

Answer 1

é is what é looks like when it's encoded as UTF-8 and mistakenly decoded as ISO-8859-1 or windows-1252 (or "ANSI", as Microsoft apps like to call it). When you open the file in Notepad, it automatically detects the encoding as UTF-8. Then you change the encoding by saving it as "ANSI", which works because é is supported by that encoding as well.

When you view the page in Outlook, what does the it say the encoding is? That HTTP dump looks like well-formed UTF-8 to me, but Outlook seems to be reading it as ISO-8859-1 or windows-1252. I don't use Outlook and I don't know its quirks; are you sure you got the headers right?

Answer 2

You don't need to convert anything! Just specify in the HTTP response headers on the text/x-vcard document that the response is UTF-8 encoded (Response.CharSet or Response.ContentEncoding or similar - not sure what your specific situation is).

Also, you could try emitting an UTF-8 Byte Order Mark to help the client determine the encoding.