title: UTF-8 server encoding results in � characters on an ASP.NET site
body: <p>I am running an ASP.NET WebForms <a href="http://dotnetblogengine.net/" rel="nofollow">blog engine</a> web site at maxpavlov.com</p>
  
  <p>I am writing mostly in Russian on my blog. Sometimes, even though I am writing a perfectly normal Russian characters in, when I view the resulting rendered blog post page, I get some symbols substituted with �� characters. </p>
  
  <p>I started digging. First, I have checked to see if a UTF-8 is set as a response encoding in the globalization section in web.config. It always was. Then I have noticed, that the pages my site generate don't have a <code>&lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"&gt;</code> attibute provided in the page header. So I have added it to both masterpages (the display one, and the admin one - it is blogengine.net's specific stuff).</p>
  
  <p>Now all pages that the web server generates have the charset value set to UTF-8, but the problem remains.</p>
  
  <p>The site, when I create a blog post saves it to XML file, that also has an encoding set at the top of the XML file to UTF-8 with the following line: 
  <code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?&gt;</code></p>
  
  <p>Still, problem characters appear in the browsers, when I go to my site.</p>
  
  <p>Where else should I fix this encoding problem?</p>
  
  <p>More info: Fiddler tells me that the response header <code>Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8</code></p>
  
  <p>What is interesting, is that in different browsers, different characters in the HTTP Response get substituted with a �. </p>