Code Pages, Cookies & Character Sets

I'm a little perplexed. <%@Codepage="65001" %> changes how IIS/ASP will handle interpreting query string variables - i.e. it will read the querystring as being utf-8 encoded.

However, I'm finding that it *doesn't* change how Response.Cookies or
Request.Cookies get read/written.

I've been testing with a little jscript asp page with the lines

if (String (Request.QueryString ("abc")) != "undefined")
Response.Cookies("abc") = Request.QueryString ("abc");
Response.Write (Request.QueryString ("abc"));

to take a value from the query string and pass it back out as a cookie. The test value I was using was r%c3%a9sume (resume with an accented e). When the code page is set to utf-8, it will properly interpret the urlencoded query as a utf-8 string. It will output the right bytes with Response.Write.

But watching the headers produced by the request, it comes out encoded in latin-1.
Set-Cookie: abc=r%E9sume; path=/

I checked the cookie rfc on w3c.org, and oddly it doesn't say much about how to encode/interpret cookie NAME=VALUEs. The only comment on character set in the spec is that a cookie *comment* has to be utf-8 encoded.

I couldn't find anything on the MSDN documentation that addressed cookie character sets either.