Hello all!

Good morning to all the Forum’s Ninjas, Forum’s users, and guests!!!

We are back with the Tuesday’s Featured Post where we discuss a Forum Post or a forum thread from the MSDN or TechNet Forums and then highlight the value that they added.

Lately I have been hearing a lot of people saying that they did not get a correct answer or answer came very late and they had already solved their problem. These statements came from people whose posts related to their problem had a mixed response on various platform. Today however, I want to take the opportunity and try to walk you through - what would be the best way to get an answer to your question in various forums. To show this there is an excellent example: Encoding special strings - how to make this work?, question asked by Naomi N. Naomi is one of the senior members, who manages various forums. She posted her question in with a code-snippet and asked for the output she required. In short version her question is to encode/decode Spanish characters so they would pass within a URL.

This question got various replies like:

@Naomi,

Do you think the problem might not be on the encoding part like the code you listed here rather on the decoding? Could you please check if the webapi decodes the string properly before use it? ...

This reply is posted by Saar Shen and he suggested to Decode the url. Unfortunately, above answer did not help Naomi.

I came to know about this question and tried to help on getting the correct answer to the problem and I gave my answer as follows:

Hi Naomi,

I can feel your pain due to the issue. Base64 is always a painful for me. We used Base32 to overcome from this issue. I also see one more issue in your code...

 

After this there was huge conversation on the forum [please check forum post for more information], Naomi followed-up until she got the final answer. Finally, she got the answer that resolved her problem.

I really appreciate the way Naomi did a follow-up to get resolution for her problem. In my opinion, this is the only way to get a perfect answer of your problems.

 

- Ninja Gaurav