ASP.NET Web API content encoding

Question

I've created an API.NET Web API. It uses the default utf-8 content encoding. I need the output to be in latin-1 to match the database.

If your output encoding needs to match your database encoding, you're probably doing it wrong... http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html — Jonas Høgh, Jan 30 '14 at 13:52
Can you elaborate as to how I should do it? My DB uses Latin-1 encoding, characters from this DB are then displayed on a webpage which is utf-8 (as default), so I want to set the page to Latin 1 so characters are displayed properly. — S.., Jan 30 '14 at 14:00
Are you extracting data from the DB as raw byte-arrays and emitting these directly to your output? If you're using a DB library that handles text types from the DB as .net strings, these should be converted to UCS-2 like all other .net strings by the library, and your database encoding should be irrelevant. — Jonas Høgh, Jan 30 '14 at 15:05
Can you give me an example of when it's okay to have utf-8 in the db and a different encoding type on the rendered webpage? — S.., Jan 30 '14 at 15:09
What DB and library are you using? If you use the library to select a char type from the db into a .net string variable, do the non-ASCII characters in the string display correctly in the debugger? — Jonas Høgh, Jan 30 '14 at 15:13
To answer your previous question, it's almost always okay to have different encodings in the DB and the web output, since the framework will normally translate from the DB format to UCS-2 while reading from the DB, and then further translate to the output format when writing to the output. You shouldn't be seeing this problem unless something is going wrong when reading from the DB. — Jonas Høgh, Feb 03 '14 at 12:14
Agreeing with Jonas here. The "output" of the rendering goes to the browser and at that point it gets encoded from .net's Unicode strings to whatever the content negotion resulted in. If a) your data looks good in the database, b) it looks bad on a latin1 browser and c) you are sure that all database characters are actually translatable into latin1, the problem is with your database access. You can check this by looking at the .net strings in the debugger when stepping through your controller actions. If they are garbage, asp.net can't do anything about it. — Volker, Dec 16 '16 at 21:18

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 03 '14 at 09:28

There is a article here that shows how to do this http://blogs.msdn.com/b/henrikn/archive/2012/04/22/asp-net-web-api-content-negotiation-and-accept-charset.aspx

You just need to change from this article to remove all the encode suported and include just latin-1

something like this in your app start

   protected void Application_Start()
   {

       Encoding latinEncoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("Latin-1");
       GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.JsonFormatter.SupportedEncodings.Add(latinEncoding);
       GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.JsonFormatter.SupportedEncodings.RemoveAt(0);

   }

And add the below namespace:

using System.Text;

JsonFormatter is null and I get a runtime exception trying to add to its supported encodings. Any ideas? — S.., Feb 03 '14 at 09:26

ASP.NET Web API content encoding

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