Creating XML in C# with UTF8 encoding

Question

I know that there is a lot of tutorials about this and even answered questions here, but I have problem I'm trying to resolve for hours and I read almost everything here, but this still remains mistery for me. Please help:

I'm creating XML, and it's created, but the problem is that encoding is UTF-16, and it should be UTF-8. This is what I tried so far, but still is UTF-16:

        var xmlText = new StringBuilder();

        using (var xml = XmlWriter.Create(xmlText))
        {
            xml.WriteStartDocument();
            xml.WriteStartElement("Weather");


            if (model.ModuleList[0] != null)
            {
                foreach (var weather in model.ModuleList)
                {
                    var AddProperty = new Action<XmlWriter, ModuleModel>((a, forc) =>
                    {
                        xml.WriteStartElement("Forecast");
                        a.WriteElementString("Description", forc.Description);
                        a.WriteElementString("Date", forc.Date.ToString());
                        a.WriteElementString("MinTemp", forc.Min_Temp.ToString());
                        a.WriteElementString("MaxTemp", forc.Max_Temp.ToString());
                        a.WriteElementString("Pressure", forc.Pressure.ToString());
                        a.WriteElementString("Humidity", forc.Humidity.ToString());                           
                        xml.WriteEndElement();
                    });
                    AddProperty(xml, weather);
                }
            }             

            xml.WriteEndElement();
            xml.WriteEndDocument();
        }
        var xmlresult = xmlText.ToString();

How to set encoding to my XML to UTF-8? Please help...

You're writing the XML into a StringWriter. It's somewhat obvious that the encoding of a StringWriter would be the native string encoding that C# uses internally, which is UTF-16. Just write your XML to a UTF-8 Writer. — millimoose
– millimoose, Commented Sep 6, 2013 at 23:20
@MiMo Seeing how strings ultimately have to be stored in a sequence of bytes, they should have some internal encoding, unless C# stores 32-bit code points directly. Since char is 2-bytes which does not cover all of Unicode, I doubt this. — millimoose
– millimoose, Commented Sep 6, 2013 at 23:33
Write it to a MemoryStream, and set the encoding explicitly using XmlWriterSettings with the XmlStream.Create(Stream, XmlWriterSettings) overload. — millimoose
– millimoose, Commented Sep 6, 2013 at 23:38

MiMo · Accepted Answer · 2013-09-06 23:28:30Z

1

The result of your code is a string xmlresult - and strings do not have an encoding, they are always Unicode.

You use an encoding when you convert a string to a sequence of byte - so your problem is not in the piece of code you posted, but in the code you use to write that string to a file.

Something like this:

 using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(fileName, true, Encoding.UTF8))
 {
     writer.Write(xmlresult);
 }

will write a UTF-8 file - where filename contains the path of the file.

If you need UTF-8 encoded bytes in memory use:

var utf8Bytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("xmlresult");

edited Sep 6, 2013 at 23:28

answered Sep 6, 2013 at 23:21

MiMo

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8 Comments

Edna Over a year ago

I actually need XML in UTF8 to store it in database. I'll try different approach then. I'm doing this first time so everything is new for me... Appreciate your help, thanks.

Edna Over a year ago

Can you please tell me what is fileName in your example above?

MiMo Over a year ago

Which is the data type of the database column you need to write the XML to? Which database are you using?

millimoose Over a year ago

@user2710923 Most databases should support Unicode strings / text fields.

MiMo Over a year ago

The XML type in SQL Server handles the encoding internally - you don't have to do any conversion - and actually you don't even need to build a string, you can use an XmlReader directly.

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