(UPDATED: This question get updated after a better understanding of what's going on, I removed noisy wrong parts.)
This piece of code belongs to a COM DLL. For the context, it contains an ActiveX object which is created and handled inside a classic ASP Page.
Public Function getHttpResponse(url As String)
Dim request As New WinHttpRequest
On Error GoTo errGetHttpResponse
request.Open "HEAD", url
request.Send
getHttpResponse = request.Status
Exit Function
errGetHttpResponse:
getHttpResponse = Err.Description
End Function
The Err.Description string localization and encoding seems to rely on the running environment. For an error 80072EE5, I get for Err.Description (retrieved from the GUI of an executable loading the DLL):
L'URL n'est pas valideL’URL n’est pas valide, hexdump gives:It is noticeable that the apostrophe isn't the same.
The ASP page calling and displaying the ActiveX output could be simplified like this:
Session.LCID=1036 ' French identifier (global.asa file)
Dim o : Set o = CreateObject("TheDLL.TheObject")
Response.Write o.getHttpResponse(anInvalidUrl)
While it renders correctly if run from Machine 1, from Machine 2 the apostrophe is hidden (source viewing on Firefox show a 00 92 square character). The generated HTML from Machine 2 is reproduced below:
00000000 4c 92 55 52 4c 20 6e 92 65 73 74 20 70 61 73 20 |L.URL n.est pas |
00000010 76 61 6c 69 64 65 |valide
The apostrophe became encoded as 0x92, which is RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK encoded in ISO-8859-1.
How is the difference explainable? And optionally is there a way to set the get this output platform-independent?
(And yes, this is a soon-to-die legacy code.)
After a extended discussion in the comment section with Remy Lebeau and GSerg, here are the keys to understand the differences:
Response.Charset and Session.Codepage for ASP pages, or default values if not specifiedL'URL to L’URL)