[ASP] XMLHTTP object reads external pages in unicode?

Hi guys,

I have an ASP script that basically visit the given URL and saves the output as an HTML file. This is the readUrl function:

function readUrl(url)
Dim xml
Set xml = Server.CreateObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP.4.0")
xml.Open "GET", url, False
xml.Send
readUrl = xml.responseText
Set xml = Nothing
end function

I cannot write the result of this function to a text file unless I do a format check using another function:

function getFileFormat(ByRef vTxt)
const UNICODE = -1, ASCII = 0
a2 = Asc(Mid(vTxt,2,1))
w3 = AscB(MidB(vTxt,3,1))
w2 = AscB(MidB(vTxt,2,1))
getFileFormat = ASCII
if a2<>w2 AND a2=w3 Then getFileFormat = UNICODE
end function

So I can create the text file using;

content = readUrl(url)
Set newFile = fso.CreateTextFile(file,true,getFileFormat(content))

The file created is always in unicode instead of ASCII. If I force to write in ASCII, I get an error because the content is in unicode. This make the HTML files double in size, and weird-looking in some applications (one space after every character)

Has anybody used XMLHTTP or a similar thing? Do you know how to avoid this problem?

Thanks