Problems with special chars when outputting a text stream from a aspx file

Hi all

I want to allow people to download vCards that I genereate on the fly. Since vCards is basically just a specially formatted text file, it's easy to read the required data from a database and simply change the Response.ContentType to "text/x-vCard" and then send the content of the file. It all works great, unless theres a special chars in there like Ø, Æ and Å or similar. The content looks right up until I do a Response.Write(sb.ToString()), but when I open the file on my computer after it's finished downloading, the special chars are looking weird. So my guess is that the Response object does something to the encoding, but I cant figure out how to disable it, please help.

Ive included the code below from my Page_Load method. My .aspx is completely empty (besides the required <%@ Page ... directives).

Thanks, Egil.

-------------------------------------------

// Buffer response so that page is sent

// after processing is complete.

Response.BufferOutput = true;

// Surpress the HTTP Content-Type header

Response.Charset = null; // "utf-8"; //"iso-8859-2";

Response.HeaderEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;

Response.ContentEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;

// Clear response stream

Response.Clear();

// Set the response mime type for vCard

Response.ContentType = "text/x-vCard";

// Build output

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

// Add headers

sb.AppendLine("BEGIN:VCARD");

sb.AppendLine("VERSION:2.1");

// Add content

// last and first name

sb.AppendLine(String.Format("N:{0};{1}", "Some last name", "Some first name"));

// full name

sb.AppendLine(String.Format("FN:{0} {1}", "Some first name", "Some last name").Trim());

// title

if(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(p["title"])) {

sb.AppendLine(String.Format("TITLE:{0}", "Some title"));

}

// phone

if(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(p["telephoneNumber"])) {

sb.AppendLine(String.Format("TEL;PREF:{0}", "Some phone number"));

}

// mobile

if(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(p["mobile"])) {

sb.AppendLine(String.Format("TEL;CELL;VOICE:{0}", "Some mobile number"));

}

// mail

if(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(p["mail"])) {

sb.AppendLine(String.Format("EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:{0}", "Some email"));

}

// add footers

sb.AppendLine("END:VCARD");

// Add string to output

Response.Write(sb.ToString());

// Send all currently buffered output to the client and stops execution of the page.

Response.End();

Re: Problems with special chars when outputting a text stream from a aspx file

You could try Response.BinaryWrite instead of Response.Write and see what happens.

Re: Problems with special chars when outputting a text stream from a aspx file

Hi,

Whatever I comment the following two line or not, the ouput vcard.vcf is UTF-8 encoded.

Response.HeaderEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;

Response.ContentEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;

I've add a Chinese word in title. I doesn't make any other modification except comment the line as following since varialbe p is not accessible here.

//if(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(p["telephoneNumber"])) {

sb.AppendLine(String.Format("TEL;PREF:{0}", "Some phone number"));

//}

The output vcard is as following, you can try open it with MS Word, it will automatically select the encoding and point out it is exactly UTF-8.

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N:Some last name;Some first name
FN:Some first name Some last name
TITLE:Some title
TEL;PREF:Some phone number
TEL;CELL;VOICE:Some mobile number
EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:Some email
END:VCARD