.Net multipart/form-data form enctype and UTF-8 "special" characters => � (MVC w/ HttpPostedFileBase)

Goal: Upload / post CSV file w/ UTF-8 characters to an MVC action, read the the data and stick it in a database table. Problem: Only the plain text characters make it through. UTF-8 "special" characters like á are not coming through correctly, in code and in the database they render as this character => �. More: I'm convinced that this isn't a problem with my C# code although I've included the important parts below. I thought the problem was that the uploaded file is encoded a plain text or "plain/text" MIME type, but I was able to change that by changing the file extension to .html Summary: How do you get a form with an enctype attribute set to "multipart/form-data" to correctly interpret UTF-8 characters in a posted file? Research: From my research this appears to be a common problem without a common and clear solution. I've found more solutions for java and PHP than .Net as well. csvFile variable is of type HttpPostedFileBase this is the MVC action signature `[HttpPost]` `public ActionResult LoadFromCsv(HttpPostedFileBase csvFile)` Things I've tried: 1) ``` using (Stream inputStream = csvFile.InputStream) { byte[] bytes = ReadFully(inputStream); string bytesConverted = new UTF8Encoding().GetString(bytes); } ``` 2) ``` using (Stream inputStream = csvFile.InputStream) { using (StreamReader readStream = new StreamReader(inputStream, Encoding.UTF8, true)) { while (!readStream.EndOfStream) { string csvLine = readStream.ReadLine(); // string csvLine = new UTF8Encoding().GetString(new UTF8Encoding().GetBytes(readStream.ReadLine())); // stupid... this can not be the way! } } } ``` 3) ``` <form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data" accept-charset="UTF-8"> ``` 4) ``` <input type="file" id="csvFile" name="csvFile" accept="UTF-8" /> <input type="file" id="csvFile" name="csvFile" accept="text/html" /> ``` 5) When the file has a .txt extension, the ContentType property of the HttpPostedFileBase is "text/plain" When I change the file extension from .txt to .csv the ContentType property of the HttpPostedFileBase is "application/vnd.ms-excel" When I change the file extension to .html, the ContentType property of the HttpPostedFileBase is "text/html" - I thought this was going to be a winner, but it wasn't. In my soul I have to believe there is an easy solution to this problem. It surprises me that I haven't been able to figure this one out on my own, uploading UTF-8 characters in a file is a common task! Why am I failing here?!?! Perhaps I have to adjust mime types in IIS for the website? Perhaps I need different DOCTYPE / html tag / meta tags? @Gabe - Here is what my post looks like in fiddler. This is really interesting because the � is plain as day, right there in the post value. ``` http://localhost/AwesomeGeography/GeoBytesCities/LoadFromCsv?adsf HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://localhost/AwesomeGeography/GeoBytesCities/LoadFromCsv?adsf Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------199122566726299 Content-Length: 354 -----------------------------199122566726299 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="csvFile"; filename="cities_test.html" Content-Type: text/html "CityId","CountryID","RegionID","City","Latitude","Longitude","TimeZone","DmaId","Code" 3344,10,1063,"Luj�n de Cuyo","-33.05","-68.867","-03:00",0,"LDCU" -----------------------------199122566726299-- ```