Weird HtmlEncoding / Decoding Issue

Question

I have a text that I am pulling in from an XML file. The text itself (as stored in the xml) has numerous html tags scattered throughout. I parse through this text and store it in a database and then later retrieve it and display it on screen. For the most part, it works fine. The HTML tags encode / decode properly and things render as I expect.

However, sometimes, the text itself also contains odd characters (think letters with accents, long dashes, etc). These are proving to be problematic and I can't figure out why. When I step through the code they have appropriately encoded values and if I use HtmlEncode or HtmlDecode they render the proper output character - but in my browser they look awful. For example, I have one piece of text that should say:

Dear Mrs. Budson —

It ends up rendering as

Dear Mrs. Budson —

When I look at what is stored in the database, it is stored as & # 8199 ; (without all the spaces). HtmlDecode() decodes this as — but my browser is displaying something completely different. Any ideas?

Answer 1

This may probably help. Don't have enough privileges to comment, hence answer.