In one of the projects that I’m working in we had to do some server-side transforming using MSXML. Everything went well until we transformed some pages using German umlauts. The encoding in the XML file was correctly set but the result was completely ignoring the umlauts, replacing them with the question mark sign.

The code was using the transformNode() method. In this case MSXML is always using internally a string format called BSTR which is UTF-16 encoded data. So whatever encoding is set it will be ignored.
The solution is to use transformNodeToObject() method which is keeping the encoding settings.

You can download the complete Notes Dabatase from here: MSXMLEnc.nsf

Sub transform()
	On Error Goto errorHandler

        Const urlBase = “http://localhost/MSXMLEnc.nsf”

	Dim xmlDoc As Variant, xslDoc As Variant
	Dim xmlDocURL As String, xslDocURL As String

	xmlDocURL = urlBase + “/article.xml”
	xslDocURL =  urlBase + “/article.xsl”

	‘ initthe XML and XSL
	Set xmlDoc = CreateObject(“Msxml2.DOMDocument.3.0″)
	xmlDoc.async = False
	Set xslDoc = CreateObject(“Msxml2.DOMDocument.3.0″)
	xslDoc.async = False

        ‘ load the XML and XSL
	xmlDoc.load( xmlDocURL )
	xslDoc.load( xslDocURL )

        ‘ we need to do the transformation using the transformNodeToObject()  
        ‘method and a stream implementing the IStream interface.
	‘ If not the character encoding is not kept
	Dim adoStream As Variant
	Set adoStream = CreateObject(“ADODB.Stream”)
	adoStream.Open
	adoStream.Type = 2 	‘2 -> adTypeText -> Text data
        adoStream.Charset = “ISO-8859-15″

	‘transform and store the result in stream
	Call xmlDoc.transformNodeToObject(xslDoc, adoStream)

	‘place in a file and attach it
	Dim strDocUNID As String
	strDocUNID = storeHTML( adoStream )

	adoStream.Close
	Set adoStream = Nothing
	Set xmlDoc = Nothing
	Set xslDoc = Nothing

	Print “[” + urlBase “/0/” + strDocUnid + “/$file/article.html]”

	Exit Sub
errorHandler:
	Print “Error #”+Cstr(Err)+” <”+Error$+“>in MSXML Transformation on line “ 
+Cstr(Erl)

	Exit Sub

End Sub