Thread: Special Characters in DropDownList

I have stored special characters in a database (µ) and want to display these in a dropdownlist on a page.

When I retrieve the records from the db, it is writing the special character as ?? when it should be µ It even does the same if I write it out to the screen.

Other special characters such as € appear fine when written to the screen.

I've tried using Server.HTMLEncode in my data access function:-

Code:

                            while (rs.Read())
                            {
                                weightList.Add(Convert.ToInt32(rs["id"]), HttpContext.Current.Server.HtmlEncode((string)rs["weight"]));
                            }

where weightList is a Dictionary<int, string> object and HTMLDecode in my page. The weight value from my stored procedure is:-

Code:

CONCAT(A.Amount,B.ShortName) AS weight

When I call the sp in Query Browser, the characters appear fine, but I can't get them to appear either in the dropdown or on the screen correctly.

I've done a workaround of adding another field in my table that has the HTML code ( &micro; ) and using Server.HtmlDecode on this shows the character correctly.

Would still like to know if there's a way of using the character directly from the db though.

You need to look into character encoding. The characters in the database should be saved in the correct format, UTF-8, for example, and the page itself needs to be set and saved at UTF-8.

I checked on the db and the characterset is utf8.

The default for a web page would be utf8 also, wouldn't it? I tried including a meta http-equiv statement on the page, but that didn't help either. Not working on it today, so will take another look when I'm next on it.