WebService: Difference between my pc and server

Question

I have a bug where special characters (danish 'ø' in this case) are shown correctly when running locally, but wrong when the code runs on a server (I get a pipe '|'). I was trying to solve this today, but I did not have access to the server, other than updating the code files. I will limited access monday, so I can at least write intermediate results to a log file, but to be prepared I thought I'd ask for suggestions here.

Program flow:

AC# test calls my own web service via a WebRequest. This web service calls an external web service via another web request.

When running my own web service locally I get correct results returned from the external web service.

When deploying the code to the server the external web service returns an error; it didn't find the word I was searching for. Except that I entered 'Bøssemagergade', but the word it complains about is returned as 'B|ssemagergade'. What can cause this difference? AFAIK the server runs with the exact same regional settings as my local machine.

I'm sure this is common stuff, but I haven't been doing web services before (I do feel at home with C#/.NET though, and know about encodings etc.).

Thanks!

Answer 1

You need to check your data at every stage in the process. Make sure you understand which encoding you're using (try to avoid using Encoding.Default ) and verify the binary data going across the wire with something like WireShark .

See my debugging unicode problems article for further information.