problem with £ being posted back to site

[teesea77]

Hi

I'm having a bit of difficulty with some text encoding, the problem is
that i have set up all posts so that "ISO-8859-1" is used so that when
a user adds the pound symbol "£" in a text area field then character
is encoded to "&#163" and if the user includes "&" in the text area
then the character is encoded to "&", this is nessasary so that
users can use the "£" symbol. The problem is that text area field has
a character length validatin check on it and if the user includes the
"£" or "&" characters in the text then the characters are counted as 5
and 4 characters respectiveley instead of 1. I have tried to convert
the string from the text area to "ISO-8859-1" so that "&#163" is
changed to "£" using the code below but this does not seem to work.

String aString = jobDescriptionTextArea.Value;

Encoding latinEuropeanEncoding =
System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1");
Encoding uniCode = Encoding.Unicode;

byte[] latinBytes = latinEuropeanEncoding.GetBytes(aString);

byte[] unicodeBytes = Encoding.Convert(latinEuropeanEncoding,
uniCode, latinBytes);

char[] unicodeCharArray = new char[uniCode.GetCharCount(unicodeBytes,
0, unicodeBytes.Length)];

uniCode.GetChars(unicodeBytes, 0, unicodeBytes.Length,
unicodeCharArray, 0);

String outputString = new String(unicodeCharArray);

Response.Write("converted string >" + outputString + "<<br>");

Any suggestions?

Cheers

Tony

[Joerg Jooss]

Thus wrote te******@googlemail.com,

Hi

I'm having a bit of difficulty with some text encoding, the problem is
that i have set up all posts so that "ISO-8859-1" is used so that when
a user adds the pound symbol "£" in a text area field then character
is encoded to "&#163" and if the user includes "&" in the text area
then the character is encoded to "&amp;",

This is actually HTML encoding of Unicode characters and has nothing to do
with ISO-8859-1.

this is nessasary so that
users can use the "£" symbol. The problem is that text area field has
a character length validatin check on it and if the user includes the
"£" or "&" characters in the text then the characters are counted as 5
and 4 characters respectiveley instead of 1. I have tried to convert
the string from the text area to "ISO-8859-1" so that "&#163" is
changed to "£" using the code below but this does not seem to work.

How is the validation check implemented? In JavaScript on the client? ASP.NET
knows that "&#163" is one character, so a CustomValidator shouldn't have
this problem. Also note that you can encode the pound sign natively. You
don't have to use a HTML character entity.

Your code is more or less a NOOP if all characters jobDescriptionTextArea.Value
can be represented in Latin 1 -- it just shuttles the characters back and
forth between UTF-16 and Latin 1 representaton.

Cheers,
--
Joerg Jooss
ne********@joergjooss.de