How to deal with special characters in ASP.NET's HyperLink.NavigateUrl?

Question

I am currently having troubles figuring out how to handle a filepath to be (dynamicly) passed out to a HyperLink control's NavigateUrl property.

Let's say that I'm trying to refer to a file named jäynä.txt at the root of C:.
Passing "file:///C:/jäynä.txt" result to a link to file:///C:/jäynä.txt, as does HttpUtility.UrlPathEncode("file:///C:/jäynä.txt").

Replacing the ä**s with **%E4, which gives the string "file:///C:/j%E4yn%E4.txt", does give a working link to file:///C:/jäynä.txt, but I have not been able to find a way to make the replacement without defining it myself. With Replace("ä", "%E4"), for example.

Is there a way to automaticly handle the filepath string so that the HyperLink would display it correctly, without manualy listing what characters to replace in the string?

Additional Note:
There may be a way to work around this by spesifying the character encoding in which the page is rendered, because debugging shows that the HyperLink at least saves the string "file:///C:/jäynä.txt" unchanged, but somehow mangles it around the time of rendering.
However, this seems only be the case in rendering of the NavigateUrl because other components as well as HyperLink's Text-property are all quite capable of rendering the character ä unchanged.

Answer 1

This is due to how the browser starts to interpret the path, typically individuals will avoid using characters such as that in the urls of pages.

In your case, I believe you have struck upon the best case scenario, as I am not aware of any way to change the behavior of HttpUtility and/or the NavigateUrl property. At least not without creating a custom control for it.

Answer 2

The NavigateUrl property of a Hyperlink will encode unicode chars in the url.

Instead you can set the href attribute property of the Hyperlink like this:

hyperlink1.Attribute("href") = "file:///C:/jäynä.txt"

Answer 3

Don't use HyperLink control. Instead use HtmlAnchor control. It will solve your problem. I don't know why Microsoft designed like this.

Answer 4

Thank you! The post using the 'attributes' solved my problem. In my case it was

HyperLink6.Attributes["href"] = "http://høgstedt.danquah.dk/";

The problem of using special danish characters in a url seem to have been troubling a lot of programmers - a search provides several very complicated approaches. This one is SIMPLE and it SIMPLY WORKS. So once again, thank you