c# - HttpUtility.HtmlEncode doesn't encode everything

Question

I am interacting with a web server using a desktop client program in C# and .Net 3.5. I am using Fiddler to see what traffic the web browser sends, and emulate that. Sadly this server is old, and is a bit confused about the notions of charsets and utf-8. Mostly it uses Latin-1.

When I enter data into the Web browser containing "special" chars, like "Ω π ? ∞ ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?" fiddler show me that they are being transmitted as follows from browser to server: "♈ ♉ ♊ ♋ ♌ ♍ ♎ ♏ ♐ ♑ ♒ ♓ "

But for my client, HttpUtility.HtmlEncode does not convert these characters, it leaves them as is. What do I need to call to convert "?" to ♈ and so on?

Answer 1

Rich Strahl just posted a blog post, Html and Uri String Encoding without System.Web, where he has some custom code that encodes the upper range of characters, too.

/// <summary>
/// HTML-encodes a string and returns the encoded string.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="text">The text string to encode. </param>
/// <returns>The HTML-encoded text.</returns>
public static string HtmlEncode(string text)
{
    if (text == null)
        return null;

    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(text.Length);

    int len = text.Length;
    for (int i = 0; i < len; i++)
    {
        switch (text[i])
        {

            case '<':
                sb.Append("&lt;");
                break;
            case '>':
                sb.Append("&gt;");
                break;
            case '"':
                sb.Append("&quot;");
                break;
            case '&':
                sb.Append("&amp;");
                break;
            default:
                if (text[i] > 159)
                {
                    // decimal numeric entity
                    sb.Append("&#");
                    sb.Append(((int)text[i]).ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture));
                    sb.Append(";");
                }
                else
                    sb.Append(text[i]);
                break;
        }
    }
    return sb.ToString();
}