Sharepoint URL strange behavior

Question

i have 2 SP 2010 enviroments (Dev and prd)... in a certain webpart i get the value of "param1" in the query string, like: string param1String = Request.QueryString["param1"]

if i pass this url: http:// NameOfServer/myPage?param1=hello world
everthing works fine everywhere... in dev and prd param1String will be "hello world"

now... if i pass this: http:// NameOfServer/myPage?param1=Henry Caçado
(note the 'ç') param1String in the dev enviroment will be 'Henry Caçado' BUT IN !!!PRD!!! it will be 'Henry Ca¶ado' (or some other special char)... ive tried everything... i could not find any solution that works... Ive tryed HttpUtility.UrlEnconde/Decode... SPEncoding.URLEncode/Decode... ive even wrote a Javascript that dynamically set the url...

note that if i encode on the whitespaces " "->"%20" it works fine... but if i encode a special char... no game...

Edit:I just noticed if i SPEncode.UrlEncode this url
http://myServer/_layouts/newsolicitationpage.aspx?rootFolder=itens anexos/default&ForceCompetence=Declaração de Carência
i get a generic "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" error

Answer 1

Check the collation on your content database and on your database server itself as that could easily cause this. There is a decent explanation here : http://blog.sharepointcookbook.com/2008/09/sql-collation-and-sharepoint-2007.html

Answer 2

i could not managed to work around it... so i created an alias field where there are no special chars so i could use the query string...