encoding after upgrade

Question

I have a MVC application that was in .net6 and I upgraded to .net9 and now the layout and section text are encoded even when I dont want. Things like compiles as How can I stop this?

Emily Foster · Answer

I see that after upgrading your MVC application from .NET 6 to .NET 9, you are encountering encoding issues where certain characters like the plus sign in JSON script tags are being encoded unnecessarily. This unintended encoding can sometimes occur due to changes in how strings are handled between different versions of frameworks. To address this problem, you can look into adjusting the text encoding settings in your application to ensure that certain characters are not encoded when they shouldn't be. Here are a few steps you can take to try and resolve this encoding issue: 1. Check Encoding Settings : Verify the encoding configuration in your application, particularly during rendering or output phases. Make sure that the encoding settings are correctly configured to avoid unnecessary encoding. 2. Encoding Type : Ensure that the proper encoding type is used when rendering content in your views. For HTML content, UTF-8 encoding is commonly recommended to support a wide range of characters without encoding issues. 3. AntiXSS Library : If you are using the AntiXSS library for input sanitization, review its configuration and rules to see if it is inadvertently encoding certain characters. Adjusting these settings might help prevent unwanted encoding. 4. HTML Encoding : While it's good practice to encode user input to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, in cases where you don't want content to be encoded (like in your JSON script tags), you may need to selectively disable or adjust encoding for specific sections of your application. By investigating and potentially adjusting these encoding settings within your .NET MVC application, you should be able to prevent the unintended encoding of characters like the plus sign in your JSON script tags. If you have any specific encoding methods or libraries in use that could be the root cause of this behavior, examining their documentation or configurations might provide further insights into resolving this issue.