Webmaster forum - Big encoding problem, urgent

Author

Big encoding problem, urgent

Shija

2007-02-22, 6:17 am

Hi,
I don't know where to ask this question, and I hope this is the right
group for this.

I've made one ASP+Access site. On that site I have few parts where
it's grabbing data from the database, and shows only those that match
particular query. When it's open, url looks something like:
....data.asp?city=Dubrovnik

Now, here is a problem. I wasn't thinking, and during adding datas in
database, I was using special croatian characters (like èæ¾¹...). When
user choose a page that contains croatian charactes, url looks
something like: ...data.asp?city=I%E8i%E6i. Codepage is windows-1250

It works fine when people are following links from my site, but when
I've made a sitemap, google shows "unreachable url's" on every page
that contains croatian charactes. For example, I've made letter "è" on
my sitemap as "%E8", but google change "%E8" to "%C4%8D", and then I'm
getting a message: "ADODB.Field error '800a0bcd'. Either BOF or EOF is
True, or the current record has been deleted", because there is no
such record in database.

Is there any way to solve it, except rearanging entire site? I've
tried other ways of coding, but non of them are working.

CJM

2007-02-22, 6:17 pm

Firstly, the best place for this kind of support is at
microsoft.public.inetserver.asp.general...

Does URLENCODEing the querystring help?
(http://www.w3schools.com/asp/met_urlencode.asp)

An alternative is to use POST instead of GET when submitting your query;
this uses Forms rather than Querystrings to pass paramaters between pages.

CJM

Shija

2007-02-22, 6:17 pm

CJM wrote:
> Firstly, the best place for this kind of support is at
> microsoft.public.inetserver.asp.general...

Thanks, I will try there.

> Does URLENCODEing the querystring help?
> (http://www.w3schools.com/asp/met_urlencode.asp)

I've already tried that, but it doesn't work.

Andy Dingley

2007-02-22, 6:17 pm

On 22 Feb, 08:26, Shija <s...@softhome.net> wrote:

> user choose a page that contains croatian charactes, url looks
> something like: ...data.asp?city=I%E8i%E6i.

> Codepage is windows-1250

Don't use Windows codepages. It's the Web, not the M$oft web. They
will often work, but sometimes they won't. Use a different encoding,
such as ISO-8859-2. This might actually need to be -8859-5 -- my last
Croatian was 11 years ago

Don't use ISO-8859-* encodings either, use UTF-8 instead. This way a
single encoding works for everyone and you won't have to swap around.
A bit more work for the computer, less work for you.

Now check that you can _publish_ Croatian text correctly. Is it
readable on the page? Is it also readable on the Google sitemap page?
Do the relevant HTTP headers get sent out for this one XML page as
well as the rest of your HTML pages? (I think this is probably your
problem).

Then check that you can still publish if it's a URL rather than text
on the page. You'll need to use ASP's Server.URLEncode() here, and the
string needs to be correct and correclty encoded first.

Then I strongly suggest re-designing the site so that no URL link
requires any non-ASCII text. Even if you get it right, there will
always be clients (RSS feeds are a classic!) that have the chance to
break things for you. Your URLs are important property, package them
well for shipping and don't make them fragile.