C# and utf8_decode

Question

Is there a C# utf8_decode equivalent?

Answer 1

Yes. You can use the System.Text.Encoding class to convert the encoding.

string source = "Déjà vu";
Encoding unicode = Encoding.Unicode;
// iso-8859-1 <- codepage 28591
Encoding latin1 = Encoding.GetEncoding(28591); 
Byte[] result = Encoding.Convert(unicode, latin1, unicode.GetBytes(s));
// result contains the byte sequence for the latin1 encoded string

edit: or simply

string source = "Déjà vu";
Byte[] latin1 = Encoding.GetEncoding(28591).GetBytes(source);

string (System.String) is always unicode encoded, i.e. if you convert the byte sequence back to string (Encoding.GetString()) your data will again be stored as utf-16 codepoints again.

Answer 2

Use the Encoding class.

For example:

byte[] bytes = something;
string str = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(bytes);

Answer 3

If your input is a string here is a method that would probably work (assuming your from wester europe :)

public string Utf8Decode(string inputDate)
{
    return Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1").GetString(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(inputDate));
}

Of course, if the current encoding of the inputData is not latin1, change the "iso-8859-1" to the correct encoding.