Globalization Tips for Web Programmers (ASP.NET)

The most important thing when you develop an ASP.NET website which interface language is portuguese, is to use the following Web.Config entry:

<globalization uiculture="pt-BR" culture="pt-BR" fileencoding="iso-8859-1" responseencoding="utf-8" requestencoding="utf-8">

The newbiest programmers usualy forget the that his application users could insert special characters into a form. When sending parameter via QueryString the browsers always convert those special characters in an encoded form via one of these functions below:

1. escape(), example: @ is escaped to %7E
2. encodeURI(), example: % is encoded to %25
   
3. encodeURIComponent(), example: @ is encoded to %40

I strongly recommend to use explicitly EncodeURIComponent() when passing parameters via URL. If you do as I say, the ASP.NET will implictly decode it when you call:

Request.Params["parameter's name"];

But if you forget the explict encode, none of the functions below will be able to retrieve correctly those special chars:

1. Microsoft.JScript.GlobalObject.unescape(), complemented by escape()
2. Microsoft.JScript.GlobalObject.decodeURI(), complemented by encodeURI()
   
3. Microsoft.JScript.GlobalObject.decodeURIComponent(), complemented by encodeURIComponent()
   
4. Server.UrlDecode(), complemented by Server.UrlEncode()

Nota: In order to use Microsoft.JScript at MS Visual Studio, you must manually Add Reference.

Javascript (and also JScript) also has escape(), encodeURI() and encodeURIComponent() and their complementary functions, that have a slightly different results from ASP.NET ones.