bulletproof .NET class or method for entity translation for e-mail sends?

[Guest]

I implement a lot of "send to friend" functionalities as well as utilizing a
lot of content that's been scraped from other places on the web.I built
these tools using Classic ASP.

Some classes of entities do not translate correctly to e-mail and are
rendered as question marks in e-mail clients.

To deal with content that had extended characters and entities (curly
quotes, etc.) I wrote translation functions that converted the "bad" strings
of characters into acceptable ones for the e-mail clients that commonly
parse our mail. These translation functions are long, and occassionally they
miss unusual entities because I haven't implemented every last exception.

I am wondering if there is a method in .NET that will reliably do this
translation for me. For that matter, I'm wondering if there was a method in
Classic ASP that would have done the same thing.

If someone can point me to the right method, and the right set of base
concepts here I'd appreciate it.

Thanks,
-KF

 

[Walter Wang [MSFT]]

Hi KF,

I'm not sure if I fully understand your question. So please correct me if
I've missed anything.

If you want to send email in .NET 2.0, you can use System.Net.Mail
(http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.mail.aspx).
MailMessage.BodyEncoding can let you set the encoding you wanted to send
the email. I believe this will automatically handle the non-ASCII
characters in the message.

If you want to encode non-ASCII characters by hand (for example, in classic
ASP), I think you can refer to "Character entity references in HTML 4"
(http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html) for how to encode them. For
example, curly quotes are encoded as “ and ”.

Here's some code for your reference in VBScript:

Function EncodeHtml( strInput )
If IsNull(strInput) Then
EncodeHtml = ""
Exit Function
End If

dim cnt, c
for cnt = 1 to len(strInput)
c = CLng(ascw(mid(strInput,cnt,1)))

' Fix for char codes larger then 23768
' ascw only returns an integer and we wrap
if ( c < 0 ) then
c = CLng(c) + 65536
end if

if ( _
( ( c > 96 ) and ( c < 123 ) ) or _
( ( c > 64 ) and ( c < 91 ) ) or _
( c = 32 ) or _
( ( c > 47 ) and ( c < 58 ) ) or _
( c = 46 ) or _
( c = 44 ) or _
( c = 45 ) or _
( c = 95 )) Then
EncodeHtml = EncodeHtml & chrw(c)
Else
EncodeHtml = EncodeHtml & "&#" & c & ";"
End If
next
End Function


Hope this helps.

Sincerely,
Walter Wang ([email protected], remove 'online.')
Microsoft Online Community Support

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[Guest]

Thanks Walter. You understood my question perfectly. I already have
character entity translation functions in place on my classic ASP apps, but
was curious if I had somehow missed somethings from the cASP world that's as
complete as MailMessage.BodyEncoding.

Thanks for the help.

-KF