Encoding, CharSet e CodePage: The dilemma

Who has never had problems with encoding special characters? We Brazilians, using our wonderful Portuguese, may have never noticed, but the English language does not have accents in their words and, therefore, has no encoding problems we face here. The coding for the English language is "UTF-8" and we use the "ISO-8859-1", but nothing prevents we use also "UTF-8". The problem is to properly configure the system to use that encoding.

As many know, Working with Web development and coding of pages has always been hard work. Recently, I have been working with the framework prototype.js for applications with AJAX and on one page, in sending emails, characters informed num field “textarea” were sent completely wrong. Below is an example of what I'm talking about:

"Survey unprecedented in Brazil “1No Map E-Gov Municipal in Brazil”, held from September to November 2007, collaboratively and involving the voluntary participation of employees "

Following a tip from friend Antonio, the problem was solved by setting the correct settings coding.

ASP pages that generate information (in my case the XML for AJAX) and ASP pages that receive requests, simply set the options below:

Response.Charset=“UTF-8”
Session.CodePage=65001

For my case, worked perfectly!

Interesting is set in the above lines include file used by all pages. This greatly facilitates maintenance issues.

If not resolved in your case, use the parallel method for fast solution based on POG I developed below:

Js function to character encoding:
…
},
codificaString: function (){
var strRetorno="";
for(var i=0;i<arguments[0].length ;i++){
if (arguments[0].charCodeAt(i)<128){
strRetorno += arguments[0].charAt(i);
}else{
strRetorno += "&#"+arguments[0].charCodeAt(i)+";";
};
};
return strRetorno;
},
…

ASP function to decode the encoded characters by the function Js
Function HTMLDecode(sText)
Dim I
sText = Replace(sText, """, Chr(34))
sText = Replace(sText, "<" , Chr(60))
sText = Replace(sText, ">" , Chr(62))
sText = Replace(sText, "&" , Chr(38))
sText = Replace(sText, " ", Chr(32))
For I = 1 to 255
sText = Replace(sText, "&#" & I & ";", Chr(I))
Next
HTMLDecode = sText
End Function

*Hope you do not need to use the method POG… ?

For more information, see the links below:

• Response.CodePage
• Specify the correct code page and character set