Encoding with HttpClient in .NET 4.5

Question

I'm consuming some data using the fogbugz XML API. This API always offers data as UTF-8.

When using the WebClient class for making a request I am able to set the encoding. For example:

var result = new WebClient(); 
result.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;

But what about the HttpClient class?

HttpClient client = new HttpClient();

Should I use:

client.GetByteArrayAsync(url);

...and then convert the bytes from the encoding (UTF-8) to a string?

Or is there a way to directly get the content as a UTF-8 string?

using (var client = Connector.GetHttpClient())
{
    var byteData = await client.GetByteArrayAsync(url);
    data = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(byteData);
}

Finally, here is an excerpt from the XML response:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response>

Answer 1

You should be able to use GetStringAsync - I'd expect the encoding to be determined by the headers in the HTTP response. If the server doesn't specify the encoding, then you should potentially ask for that to be fixed.

Alternatively, if you're fetching XML data, just fetch it as a byte array and parse that binary directly - the XML declaration should specify the encoding for non-UTF-8/UTF-16 data anyway, so I'd argue that actually there's less room for error this way.

Answer 2

If I understand correctly, you don't need a string, you need XML.

So, assuming your data is not too big, read a byte array with

byte[] bytes = await client.GetByteArrayAsync(url); 

then create a memory stream from that array, and then read XML from that stream, for example:

XElement element = XElement.Load(new MemoryStream(bytes), LoadOptions.None);

If you're using another XML API, you can use

XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(new MemoryStream(bytes));