Classic ASP: How to write unicode string data in classic ASP?

by

The Content-Type meta header informs the browser to treat the content sent as a UTF-8 encoded text stream. It doesn’t ensure that the stream sent is actually UTF-8. To handle UTF-8 correctly you need to do 3 things:-

  1. Ensure your static content is saved in a UTF-8 compatible encoding.
  2. Ensure your dynamic content is encoded to UTF-8.
  3. Inform the client that the content is UTF-8 encoded.

Item 1 requires either that you actually save the ASP file as a UTF-8 encoded file or that all your static content in the file is within the ASCII character range (0-127). Note if you save as UTF-8 then all your server-side script must use characters within the ASCII character range. In Visual Studio you can do so by “Saving the file AS…” and then clicking on the little arrow on the Save button.

Item 2 requires that the Response.CodePage property is set to the UTF-8 code page 65001, you can do this in code or by adding the attribute CODEPAGE=65001 to the <%@ %> declarations on the first line of the ASP file. If you do it in code you must set it before any calls to Response.Write.
AND: do not use chr or asc functions (these are buggy when using 65001) but use chrw and ascw instead.

Item 3 requires that the Content-Type header contains the charset=UTF-8 qualifier. As you are already doing you can do this with the META header. Personally I find that to be a bit of kludge, I prefer to use Response.Charset = "UTF-8" in code. This places the qualifier on the true Content-Type HTTP header.

More Related Contents:

  1. What’s the difference between UTF-8 and UTF-8 without BOM?
  2. What is the difference between UTF-8 and Unicode?
  3. What are Unicode, UTF-8, and UTF-16?
  4. What is the proper way to URL encode Unicode characters?
  5. UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32
  6. FPDF utf-8 encoding (HOW-TO)
  7. What’s the difference between Unicode and UTF-8? [duplicate]
  8. Manually converting unicode codepoints into UTF-8 and UTF-16
  9. Really Good, Bad UTF-8 example test data [closed]
  10. How does UTF-8 “variable-width encoding” work?
  11. How many characters can be mapped with Unicode?
  12. What’s the difference between UTF-8 and UTF-8 with BOM?
  13. ASCII vs Unicode + UTF-8
  14. UTF-8 & Unicode, what’s with 0xC0 and 0x80?
  15. UTF-8 Continuation bytes
  16. Reference: Why are my “special” Unicode characters encoded weird using json_encode?
  17. How can I output UTF-8 from Perl?
  18. utf-8 word boundary regex in javascript
  19. Javascript: Unicode string to hex
  20. How to convert a string to utf-8 in Python
  21. Unicode Characters in ggplot2 PDF Output
  22. How to correctly parse UTF-8 encoded HTML to Unicode strings with BeautifulSoup? [duplicate]
  23. How can I clean source code files of invisible characters?
  24. Can UTF-8 contain zero byte?
  25. grepping binary files and UTF16
  26. ElementTree and unicode
  27. Unicode (utf-8) with git-bash
  28. What does it mean when my text is displayed as Question Marks?
  29. Unicode output on Windows command line?
  30. Inheriting and overriding functions of a std::string?

Leave a Comment