French character 'à' is being read as 'Ã' in Classic ASP server-side and database

Question

I have a form that accepts text and is posted to the server.

If a user were to input a French character such as 'à', it will be read as 'Ã' by Classic ASP code and be stored as 'Ã' in a SQL Server 2005 database.

A similar affect happens to other accented characters. What's happening?

Answer 1

I have just gone around in circles trying to fix this once and for all in my old classic asp app which uses jquery ajax posts to store info in a database. Tried every combination with no luck..

Ended up modifying any sql selects by using the stored proc mentioned here and magic happened. Data is still stored corrupted in the database, but is displayed correctly on the site.

Answer 2

See my answer here for the detail on what is likely happening.

Utlimately you need to ensure the encoding used in the form post matches the Response.CodePage of the receiving page. You can configure the actual character set sent by a form by placing the accept-charset attribute on the form element. The default accept-charset is the documents char-set.

What exactly do you have the ASP files codepages set to (both on the page containing the form and the page receiving the post)?

What are you setting the Response.CharSet value to in the form page?

Answer 3

It's a problem of character encoding. Apparently your server and database are configured with charsets Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1, and you're receiving UTF-8 data.

You should check that your server sends a Content-Type or a Content-Encoding header with values ending with "charset=iso-8859-1".

I guess your server doesn't send the charset of the documents, and people with default configuration set to UTF-8 send UTF-8 characters which are stored as iso-8859-1 (or Windows-1252) in your database.