WPF WebBrowser and special characters like german “umlaute”

Question

I use the WPF WebBrowser Control in my app. I have a file (mht) which contains german umlaute (ä ö ü). Now, I load this this file with .Navigate(path) but the Problem is, that this charactes are not shown correct. How can I solve this?

Best Regards, Thomas

Answer 1

This is very quirky.

1. My solution was to put an explicit meta tag in my HTML file - "My Page.html"

   <meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html;charset=UTF-8'>
   

2. Then using the standard Web Browser .NET control I then created a URI object first.

   webBrowser1.Url = new Uri("My Page.html");
   

3. Then draw the page using the refresh method.

   webBrowser1.Refresh();
   

Note if you use the Navigate method directly it fails to pick up the utf-8 directive, but the URI and refresh approach does.

Quirky, but it works.

Answer 2

I have solved it with the following:

    static void webBrowser_LoadCompleted(object sender, System.Windows.Navigation.NavigationEventArgs e) {
        var webBrowser = sender as WebBrowser;
        if(webBrowser == null) {
            return;
        }
        var doc = (IHTMLDocument2)webBrowser.Document;           

        doc.charset = "utf-8";
        webBrowser.Refresh();
    }

Answer 3

The WebBrowser control uses Internet Explorer internally, whichever version you have on your local PC. If you can fix the problem in IE, it should be fixed in the WebBrowser control.