Unrecognized charSet ‘ISO-8859-1’ in contentType.

While posting to a external website, I received the following error. I changed the Request.ContentType to “text/xml”. Also added some retry logic

Error

Description: System.ServiceModel.ProtocolException: Unrecognized charSet ‘ISO-8859-1’ in contentType.

Solution

public string PostMerchantRequest(string requestXml)
{
	const string artifactPrefix = "Method: PostMerchantRequest (string). ";
	
	int retryCtr = 3;
	string responseString = String.Empty;

	log.WriteLine(artifactPrefix + "Constructing request to submit onto merchant");
	string merchantUri = Constants.Merchant.URI;
	HttpWebRequest Request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(merchantUri);
	ASCIIEncoding encoding = new ASCIIEncoding();

	byte[] postArray = encoding.GetBytes(requestXml);
	Request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
	Request.ContentLength = postArray.Length;
	Request.Method = MessageTemplate.WebRequest.OperationType.POST;
	Request.ContentType = "text/xml";

	Exception commError = null;

	while (retryCtr > 0 && String.IsNullOrEmpty(responseString))
	{
		try
		{
			Stream newStream = Request.GetRequestStream();
			newStream.Write(postArray, 0, postArray.Length);
			newStream.Close();

			HttpWebResponse webResp = (HttpWebResponse) Request.GetResponse();

			StreamReader responseStream = new StreamReader(webResp.GetResponseStream());
			responseString = responseStream.ReadToEnd();
			responseStream.Close();
			webResp.Close();
		}
		catch (Exception ex)
		{
			commError = ex;
			retryCtr--;
			log.WriteLine(artifactPrefix + "Exception in communicating with merchant. Message = " + ex.Message,LogEntryOptions.Warn);
			Thread.Sleep(3000);//Wait 3 seconds before next retry..
		}
	}

	if ( (commError!=null) && (retryCtr == 0) && String.IsNullOrEmpty(responseString))
	{
		log.WriteLine(artifactPrefix + "Retry failed in submitting request to merchant." + LogEntryOptions.Error);
		WebException webEx = new WebException(commError.Message,commError);
		throw webEx;
	}

	log.WriteLine(artifactPrefix + "Merchant response received = " + responseString);
	return responseString;

}

Happy coding !