XSLT transformation in ASP: the principles

If you want to perform server-based XSLT transformations on IIS using classic ASP, you should keep in mind the following facts:

• ASP uses 16-bit Unicode characters internally. MSXML ActiveX modules called from ASP therefore think they work in UTF-16 environment.
• Due to the impression that the XSLT transformations happen in UTF-16 environment, MSXML procedures might prepend UTF-16 specific headers in transformed text (more about that in follow-up posts).
• The transformed text returned to ASP from transformNode function is UTF-16 encoded.
• When the ASP script sends the text to the browser (or writes it into a text file), the codepage set with Response.Codepage is used to transform UTF-16 into target character set.

Further reading:

• Output XML data from ASP
• How do you write utf-8 data from ASP?
• UTF-8 text file generated from ASP
• Optimized Presentation of XML Content
• Server-Side XSLT Transformation
• AJAX ASP library
• Building XML Response in a Server-Side Script