C# Convert string from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 (Latin1) H

Question

I have googled on this topic and I have looked at every answer, but I still don't get it.

Basically I need to convert UTF-8 string to ISO-8859-1 and I do it using following code:

Encoding iso = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1");
Encoding utf8 = Encoding.UTF8;
string msg = iso.GetString(utf8.GetBytes(Message));

My source string is

Message = "ÄäÖöÕõÜü"

But unfortunately my result string becomes

msg = "�ä�ö�õ�ü

What I'm doing wrong here?

Answer 1

Use Encoding.Convert to adjust the byte array before attempting to decode it into your destination encoding.

Encoding iso = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1");
Encoding utf8 = Encoding.UTF8;
byte[] utfBytes = utf8.GetBytes(Message);
byte[] isoBytes = Encoding.Convert(utf8, iso, utfBytes);
string msg = iso.GetString(isoBytes);

Answer 2

I think your problem is that you assume that the bytes that represent the utf8 string will result in the same string when interpreted as something else (iso-8859-1). And that is simply just not the case. I recommend that you read this excellent article by Joel spolsky.

Answer 3

Try this:

Encoding iso = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1");
Encoding utf8 = Encoding.UTF8;
byte[] utfBytes = utf8.GetBytes(Message);
byte[] isoBytes = Encoding.Convert(utf8,iso,utfBytes);
string msg = iso.GetString(isoBytes);

Answer 4

You need to fix the source of the string in the first place.

A string in .NET is actually just an array of 16-bit unicode code-points, characters, so a string isn't in any particular encoding.

It's when you take that string and convert it to a set of bytes that encoding comes into play.

In any case, the way you did it, encoded a string to a byte array with one character set, and then decoding it with another, will not work, as you see.

Can you tell us more about where that original string comes from, and why you think it has been encoded wrong?

Answer 5

Seems bit strange code. To get string from Utf8 byte stream all you need to do is:

string str = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(utf8ByteArray);

If you need to save iso-8859-1 byte stream to somewhere then just use: additional line of code for previous:

byte[] iso88591data = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1").GetBytes(str);

Answer 6

Just used the Nathan's solution and it works fine. I needed to convert ISO-8859-1 to Unicode:

string isocontent = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1").GetString(fileContent, 0, fileContent.Length);
byte[] isobytes = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1").GetBytes(isocontent);
byte[] ubytes = Encoding.Convert(Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1"), Encoding.Unicode, isobytes);
return Encoding.Unicode.GetString(ubytes, 0, ubytes.Length);

Answer 7

Encoding targetEncoding = Encoding.GetEncoding(1252);
// Encode a string into an array of bytes.
Byte[] encodedBytes = targetEncoding.GetBytes(utfString);
// Show the encoded byte values.
Console.WriteLine("Encoded bytes: " + BitConverter.ToString(encodedBytes));
// Decode the byte array back to a string.
String decodedString = Encoding.Default.GetString(encodedBytes);

Answer 8

Here is a sample for ISO-8859-9;

protected void btnKaydet_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Response.Clear();
    Response.Buffer = true;
    Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.openxmlformatsofficedocument.wordprocessingml.documet";
    Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=XXXX.doc");
    Response.ContentEncoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-9");
    Response.Charset = "ISO-8859-9";
    EnableViewState = false;


    StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
    HtmlTextWriter html = new HtmlTextWriter(writer);
    form1.RenderControl(html);


    byte[] bytesInStream = Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-9").GetBytes(writer.ToString());
    MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream(bytesInStream);


    string msgBody = "";
    string Email = "mail@xxxxxx.org";
    SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient("mail.xxxxx.org");
    MailMessage message = new MailMessage(Email, "mail@someone.com", "ONLINE APP FORM WITH WORD DOC", msgBody);
    Attachment att = new Attachment(memoryStream, "XXXX.doc", "application/vnd.openxmlformatsofficedocument.wordprocessingml.documet");
    message.Attachments.Add(att);
    message.BodyEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8;
    message.IsBodyHtml = true;
    client.Send(message);}