ASP.NET 2.0 Cookbook, 2nd Edition

17.1. Localizing Request/Response Encoding

Problem

You are developing an application for a specific region, and you want to tell the browser which character set to use in rendering the page.

Solution

Set the requestEncoding and responseEncoding attributes of the <globalization> element in web.config to the desired character set:

	<system.web>
       <globalization requestEncoding="iso-8859-1" responseEncoding="iso-8859-1" />
    </system.web>

Discussion

The HTTP header returned to the browser in response to a request contains information not displayed but, nevertheless, controls how the browser displays the content it receives. Included in the header is information that specifies which character set has been used to encode the response data and, by implication, which character set the browser should use to display it.

Tip

The request and response encoding information for a page request can be viewed by setting the Trace attribute of the @ Page directive to true and viewing the Request Details section.

ASP.NET lets you specify the character set used to encode the response data using the responseEncoding attribute of the <globalization> element in the web.config file, as shown earlier. The responseEncoding attribute can be set to any valid character set. Table 17-1 lists some of the more common character sets used for European languages (English, French, German, and others).

Table 17-1. Common character sets

Character set name	Description
iso-8859-1	Commonly called Latin 1; covers the Western European ...