Unicode, VBScript and HTML - html

Question

I have the following radio box:
<input type="radio" value="香">香</input>
As you can see, the value is unicode. It represents the following Chinese character: 香
So far so good.
I have a VBScript that reads the value of that particular radio button and saves it into a variable. When I display the content with a message box, the Chinese Character appears. Additionally I have a variable called uniVal where I assign the unicode of the Chinese character directly:
radioVal = < read value of radio button >
MsgBox radioVal ' yields chinese character
uniVal = "香"
MsgBox uniVal ' yields unicode representation
Is there a possibility to read the radio box value in such a way that the unicode string is preserved and NOT interpreted as the chinese character?
For sure, I could try to recreate the unicode of the character, but the methods I found in VBScript are not working correctly due to VBScripts implicit UTF-16 setting (instead of UTF-8). So the following method does not work correctly for all characters:
Function StringToUnicode(str)
result = ""
For x=1 To Len(str)
result = result & "&#"&ascw(Mid(str, x, 1))&";"
Next
StringToUnicode = result
End Function
Cheers
Chris

Answer 1

I got a solution:
JavaScript is in possession of a function that actually works:
function convert(value) {
var tstr = value;
var bstr = '';
for(i=0; i<tstr.length; i++) {
if(tstr.charCodeAt(i)>127)
{
bstr += '&#' + tstr.charCodeAt(i) + ';';
}
else
{
bstr += tstr.charAt(i);
}
}
return bstr;
}
I call this function from my VBScript... :)

Answer 2

Here is a VBScript function that will always return a positive value for the Unicode code point of a given character:-
Function PositiveUnicode(s)
Dim val : val = AscW(s)
If (val And &h8000) <> 0 Then
PositiveUnicode = (val And &h7FFF) + &h8000&
Else
PositiveUnicode = CLng(val)
End If
End Function
This will save you loading two script engines to acheive a simple operation.
"not working correctly due to VBScripts implicit UTF-16 setting (instead of UTF-8)."
This issue has nothing to do with UTF-8. It is purely the result of AscW use of the signed integer type.
As to why you have to recreate the &#xxxxx; encodings that you sent this is result of how HTML (and XML) work. The use of this character encoding entity is a convnience that the specification does not require to remain intact. Since the character encoding of the document is quite capable or representing that character the DOM is at liberty to convert it.