Internationalization and Classic ASP
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If you've ever done work in non-English languages with Classic ASP (ASP3) and gotten black squares in side of the characters you expected, your checklist should be something like this.
Classic ASP Internationalization "Don't Lie" Checklist
- Are your ASP pages saved as UTF-8? I recommend Notepad2 (or debug.exe ;) ) as a good editor that knows what a Unicode Byte-Order-Mark looks like.
- There's two aspects to encoding with Classic ASP - there's the encoding of the page (the static stuff) and the encoding of the dynamically created content.
- Add this little-known bit-o-goodness to your pages:
Response.CodePage = 65001
Response.CharSet = "utf-8" - Make sure that the strings/content you are consuming is also the correct encoding. A very common problem is having Unicode content in an XML file but the prolog might say:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-1159-1" ?>.
This mistake will go unnoticed until José shows up. - Make sure your XML encoding matches you actual encoding:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>. - You might also ensure your Http Headers don't lie:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 - You might also ensure your META tags don't lie:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
When all these things line up, things tend to just work. Again, this is old-school stuff, so you likely don't care. Move along, nothing to see here.
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
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Great checklist Scott - thank you!
Using classic ASP with ADO and SQL Server should also be using nchar, nvarchar and ntext data types for text columns and stored-procedure paramters otherwise you will be the victim of your machine's default code page.
Using classic ASP with ADO and SQL Server should also be using nchar, nvarchar and ntext data types for text columns and stored-procedure paramters otherwise you will be the victim of your machine's default code page.
One other random little tip; make sure the meta tag appears before any fancy non-ascii content in your web page. This is really important if your users are saving pages to disk. When they go to reopen them, IE no longer has the HTTP header to help it decide what to do. If IE runs into your fancy UTF-8 encoded code point before seeing the meta tag, it sometimes tries to guess at what encoding the document is in, often incorrectly. Make sure the meta tag precedes the non-ascii text, and you're good to go.
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I get asked about those character mishandlings a lot, mostly from non-ASP.NET developers. Apparently this is easy to forget in frameworks like PHP and Java Struts.