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

Question

Hello,

I know this has been asked before!

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?

Thank You for your answers and I'm sorry if I'm asking obvious.

Answer 1

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 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

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

byte[] utfBytes = utf8.GetBytes(Message);
byte[] isoBytes = Encoding.Convert(utf8, iso, utfBytes);
string msg = iso.GetString(isoBytes);