Pound sign displaying as £ when generating CSV

Question

I have a script which loops through a GridView on my web page, and generates a CSV file out of the values.

An issue was reported with this where symbols were being displayed encoded such as:

Lorem & Ipsum
£100

I've used Server.HtmlDecode(), and this has fixed the decoded the values, fixing the ampersand, however the pound sign is now displaying a different symbol:

Lorem & Ipsum
£100

Why is this, and how can I fix this so that the Â character doesn't appear?

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The code I'm using to prep the initial value for use in CSV is:

Dim Str As String = String.Format("{0}", Server.HtmlDecode(value).Replace(",", "").Replace(Environment.NewLine, " ").Replace(Chr(10), " ").Replace(Chr(13), " "))

This decodes the HTML, replaces any commas and line breaks.

Answer 1

It's likely that your source string encoding doesn't match the output encoding. Set the content encoding before you write out the client to avoid a change in encoding that produces the results you've observed.

You can do this by setting Response.ContentEncoding; for example:

Response.ContentEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(1252);

Will give you the Windows 1252 code page. You can also use UTF-8 and ISO 8559-1, or, indeed any other encoding you want.

You can also set this consistently across your application by using the globalization element in your web.config.