Question: I am trying to retrieve specific information from a European web site. Now, the problem is I am often facing strings containing special characters such as "ä". When I try to write same into a text file it is coming as "�a". How to avoid this? My code is in VB.Net. There are no html codes for special characters in the response.

TIA!

Answer: 
In general, you should be able to do this by using the appropriate character coding for UTF-8 (which is what I assume you are trying to convert to)

Here is a [list of HTML Codes](http://webdesign.about.com/library/bl_htmlcodes.htm).

Looks like the one you are wanting is:

```
Character   Friendly Code   Numerical Code  Hex Code    Description
ä           &auml;           &#228;         &#xE4;          Lowercase A-umlaut

```

Hope that helps.
I tried using WebBrowser instead of HttpRequest and Its working.