Why I get a different result with the same HtmlDecode() function?

Question

This is my code :

string myText = \"Wählen Sie bitte\";
string myTextDecoded = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(myText);
Response.Write(myTextDecoded);
ddAdul         


        

Answer 1

You can write both variants in HTML and both will work fine (as long as the document is properly encoded). Both examples will produce the same (valid) HTML and output:

Wählen
Wählen

Unencoded Umlauts are not invalid. They are equivalent to their encoded versions.

But if you don't encode them your page's encoding must support German characters. UTF-8 does.

Why do the two variants result in different HTML? Response.Write does not encode its output so you can output HTML like "x". ListItems encode their text because you cannot output HTML in them anyway. It would make no sense to pass through unencoded text.