The '%' character, hexadecimal value 0x25

[Just D]

All,

Any valuable idea about subj: "The '%' character, hexadecimal value 0x25" ?
I tried to google, but nothing interesting was found.

Is it IIS settings problem, user side problem or whatever? We receive it
regularly and I guess the problem is not in our source codes. Please help!

Just D.

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?G=F6ran_Andersson?=]

Just D wrote:

All,

Any valuable idea about subj: "The '%' character, hexadecimal value 0x25" ?
I tried to google, but nothing interesting was found.

Is it IIS settings problem, user side problem or whatever? We receive it
regularly and I guess the problem is not in our source codes. Please help!

Just D.

What is the problem?

Is it a part of an error message? If so, you should show the entire
error message, and explain when and where it appears.

The % character has the hexadecimal character value 0x25, that is
correct. There is nothing wrong with that.

One place that I can think of where you might have problems with this
character, is if you haven't correctly encoded values in an URL. The %
character is used to encode characters in an URL. It's followed by two
hexadecimal digits that is the character code. To use the actual %
character in an URL, you have to encode it as %25. If the % character
appears in an URL without being followed by two hexadecimal characters,
the URL can't be decoded correctly, and you might get an error message
that looks something like what you mentioned.

/Göran Andersson
_____
http://www.guffa.com

[Just D]

I'm not sure if it really helps but this is the much more complete.

Just D.

Message:
-----------------
The '%' character, hexadecimal value 0x25, cannot begin with a name. Line 1,
position 2667.

Target Site:
-----------------
Boolean LoadPostData(System.String,
System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection )

Stack Trace:
-----------------
at Infragistics.WebUI.UltraWebGrid.UltraWebGrid.LoadP ostData(String
postDataKey, NameValueCollection values)
at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessPostData(NameValueCollec tion postData, Boolean
fBeforeLoad)
at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain()

ContentSizeSent (just an example):
-----------------
240903

CurrentInputStream (just an example):
-----------------
212719

HttpMethod:
-----------------
POST

ServerVariables:
-----------------
ALL_HTTP=HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL%3ano-cache%0d%0aHTTP_CONNECTION%3aKeep-Alive%0d%0aHTTP_CONTENT_LENGTH%3a240903%0d%0aHTTP_ CONTENT_TYPE%3aapplication%2fx-www-form-urlencoded%0d%0aHTTP_ACCEPT%3aimage%2fgif%2c+image %2fx-xbitmap%2c+image%2fjpeg%2c+image%2fpjpeg%2c+...

ContentType (always):
-----------------
application/x-www-form-urlencoded

UserLanguage (always):
-----------------
en-us

UserAgent (always IE, some differencies):
-----------------
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; AOL 9.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR
1.1.4322)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProducts; .NET CLR
1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET
CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; IEMB3; IEMB3)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET
CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; InfoPath.1; IEMB3; IEMB3)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705;
..NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Tablet PC 1.7; .NET CLR
1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
UrlReferred:
-----------------
always same as CurrentExecutionPath. The same UrlReferrer tells me that the
page was going to be refreshed or something like that. Maybe I'm wrong.

"Göran Andersson" <gu***@guffa.comwrote in message
news:uH**************@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...

Just D wrote:

>All,

Any valuable idea about subj: "The '%' character, hexadecimal value 0x25"
? I tried to google, but nothing interesting was found.

Is it IIS settings problem, user side problem or whatever? We receive it
regularly and I guess the problem is not in our source codes. Please
help!

Just D.

What is the problem?

Is it a part of an error message? If so, you should show the entire error
message, and explain when and where it appears.

The % character has the hexadecimal character value 0x25, that is correct.
There is nothing wrong with that.

One place that I can think of where you might have problems with this
character, is if you haven't correctly encoded values in an URL. The %
character is used to encode characters in an URL. It's followed by two
hexadecimal digits that is the character code. To use the actual %
character in an URL, you have to encode it as %25. If the % character
appears in an URL without being followed by two hexadecimal characters,
the URL can't be decoded correctly, and you might get an error message
that looks something like what you mentioned.

/Göran Andersson
_____
http://www.guffa.com

[Just D]

>The % character has the hexadecimal character value 0x25, that is

>correct. There is nothing wrong with that.

One place that I can think of where you might have problems with this
character, is if you haven't correctly encoded values in an URL. The %

I'm not using URL for anything. Yes, I'm keeping the URLs, actually the page
names for the menu to generate the menu on the fly, but that's different and
since the menu is created in the very beginning of the session it should not
be modified during the session at least if I didn't force that globally. I
didn't. Also same app/code works for many users same way and the users are
mostly not having any problems with this issue. I noticed that there are
only 4 pages from over 100 having this issue, but I maybe wrong because
these pages are mostly using by the clients and statistics is not complete
enough. Maybe it's because of some poor connection, but I guess not, the
pages are not huge, we were working with much bigger ones without any
problems, 300-400 kbytes for the fast Internet connection is nothing. The
client side serialization? Then it's a bug somewhere else, but not in our
code. Infragistics controls? I don't think so, maybe in this particular
case, but I've seen some examples on the internet with absolutely same error
message and different reason like wrong Firewall Settings, XML
serialization, wrong reference to the page instead to an external XML file,
etc. That's all I saw on the Internet, but it has nothing to my code. I'm
not serialiaing anything here and finally it mostly works fine giving us
exceptions from time to time, approximately 2-3 times per day, but very
annoying.

Any more ideas?

Just D.

>character is used to encode characters in an URL. It's followed by two
hexadecimal digits that is the character code. To use the actual %
character in an URL, you have to encode it as %25. If the % character
appears in an URL without being followed by two hexadecimal characters,
the URL can't be decoded correctly, and you might get an error message
that looks something like what you mentioned.

/Göran Andersson
_____
http://www.guffa.com

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?G=F6ran_Andersson?=]

Just D wrote:

I'm not sure if it really helps but this is the much more complete.

Just D.

Message:
-----------------
The '%' character, hexadecimal value 0x25, cannot begin with a name. Line 1,
position 2667.

Target Site:
-----------------
Boolean LoadPostData(System.String,
System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection )

[snip]

>
ContentSizeSent (just an example):
-----------------
240903

[snip]

>
HttpMethod:
-----------------
POST

[snip]

>
ContentType (always):
-----------------
application/x-www-form-urlencoded

That's a better error message. :)

I kept the most interresting parts of it in the reply.

It's telling you that there is an error in the URL encoded data at the
2667th character. As the error occurs in the LoadPostData method, there
is a problem when decoding the form data that is sent in the request.

The form data is URL encoded, you can even see that specified in the
content type. The error comes because the form data in the request is
broken.

If the error occurs frequently, and only ever with IE, that suggests
that there is either a bug in the browser, or you are doing something
that the browser was not built for.

It's a pretty large request you are getting. A normal postback would
only be a few kilobytes. Do you have a huge viewstate in the pages?

--
Göran Andersson
_____
http://www.guffa.com

[Just D]

HI Göran,

Thank you for your answer!

"Göran Andersson"

I kept the most interresting parts of it in the reply.
It's telling you that there is an error in the URL encoded data at the
2667th character. As the error occurs in the LoadPostData method, there is
a problem when decoding the form data that is sent in the request.

Yea, I suspect that and I'm going to save the stream upon this exception to
analyze it later because it seems I have no choice but to do that.

The form data is URL encoded, you can even see that specified in the
content type. The error comes because the form data in the request is
broken.

Maybe it's Infragistics controls, particularly the DataGrid that can't
accept some info inside. I tested the database and didn't find anything
suspicious. The whole stream would be more comprehensive, but it should
significantly slow the whole app down and I will do that if I have no any
other ways.

If the error occurs frequently, and only ever with IE, that suggests

Frequently means...? Over 70 times per month is so frequently? :)

that there is either a bug in the browser, or you are doing something that
the browser was not built for.

Well, it has a lot of bugs and we know that, especially after December's
"improvements".

It's a pretty large request you are getting. A normal postback would only
be a few kilobytes. Do you have a huge viewstate in the pages?

Normal for whom? We need to show the patient list, some more details, get
the schedule information, and something else. It's not looking very large,
it's real data and it's already truncated where possible.

Göran Andersson

Thanks,
Just D.