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POASP.NET WebService Returns Gibberish Characters When Throwing Exceptions
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  1. POASP.NET WebService Returns Gibberish Characters When Throwing Exceptions
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    copied!<p>I have a web service (ASMX) and in it, a web method that does some work and throws an exception if the input wasn't valid.</p> <pre><code>[ScriptMethod] [WebMethod] public string MyWebMethod(string input) { string l_returnVal; if (!ValidInput(input)) { string l_errMsg = System.Web.HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(GetErrorMessage()); throw new Exception(l_errMsg); } // some work gets done... return System.Web.HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(l_returnVal); } </code></pre> <p>Back in the client-side JavaScript on the Web page, on the error callback function, I display my error:</p> <pre><code>function GetInputErrorCallback(error) { $get('input_error_msg_div').innerHTML = error.get_message(); } </code></pre> <p>This works great and when my Web method returns (a string), it always looks perfect. However, if one of my error messages from a my thrown exception contains a special character, it's displayed incorrectly in the browser. For example, if the error message were to contain the following:</p> <p><strong>That input isn’t valid!</strong> (that's an ASCII #146 in there)</p> <p>It displays this:</p> <p><strong>That input isn’t valid!</strong></p> <p>Or:</p> <p><strong>Do you like Hüsker Dü?</strong> (ASCII # 252)</p> <p>Becomes:</p> <p><strong>Do you like Hüsker Dü?</strong></p> <p>The content of the error messages comes from XML files with UTF-8 encoding:</p> <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt; &lt;ErrorMessages&gt; &lt;Message id="invalid_input"&gt;Your input isn’t valid!&lt;/Message&gt; . . . &lt;/ErrorMessages&gt; </code></pre> <p>And as far as page encoding is concerned, in my Web.config, I have:</p> <pre><code>&lt;globalization enableClientBasedCulture="true" fileEncoding="utf-8" /&gt; </code></pre> <p>I also have an HTTP Module to set L10n parameters:</p> <pre><code>Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = m_selectedCulture; Encoding l_Enc = Encoding.GetEncoding(m_selectedCulture.TextInfo.ANSICodePage); HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentEncoding = l_Enc; HttpContext.Current.Request.ContentEncoding = l_Enc; </code></pre> <p>I've tried disabling this HTTP Module but the result is the same.</p> <p>The values returned by the web service (in the l_errMsg variable) look fine in the VS debugger. It's just once the client script has a hold of, it displays incorrectly. I've used Firebug to look at the response and special characters are mangled in there, too. So I find it pretty strange that strings returned by my web method look fine, even if there's special characters in them. Yet when I throw an exception from the web method, special characters in its message are incorrect. How can I fix this?</p>
 

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