Pound sign (£) in XML

[Waldy]

Hi there,
I am using the .Net XML Serialization classes to create XML
strings. This has been working fine up until the point that one of the
strings contained a pound sterling symbol. The application that is
processing the output complains about the character. Both the strings and
the application are using UTF-8. If you view the text in Notepad the pound
symbol looks fine, but if you view the hex, there is a character preceding
the pound sign like so: £. Why does it not get converted to £ ?

[Oleg Tkachenko [MVP]]

Waldy wrote:

I am using the .Net XML Serialization classes to create XML
strings. This has been working fine up until the point that one of the
strings contained a pound sterling symbol. The application that is
processing the output complains about the character. Both the strings and
the application are using UTF-8. If you view the text in Notepad the pound
symbol looks fine, but if you view the hex, there is a character preceding
the pound sign like so: £.
This actually looks like UTF-16. Strings in .NET are always UTF-16 encoded.
Why does it not get converted to £ ?

What for? XML is capable to contain any character from any language in
the whole world, what's the point to escape characters increasing XML
document size? You better fix your encoding issue instead.

--
Oleg Tkachenko [XML MVP, MCP]
http://blog.tkachenko.com

[Waldy]

"Oleg Tkachenko [MVP]" <oleg@NO!SPAM!PLEASEtkachenko.com> wrote in message
news:%2****************@TK2MSFTNGP15.phx.gbl...

This actually looks like UTF-16. Strings in .NET are always UTF-16
encoded.

So even though I am using a string writer encoded to UTF-8, the fact that I
assign it to a string is enough to set it back to UTF-16?

ie:

public override string GetData()

{

string strData = null;

....

XmlSerializer serialiser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(@event));

TextWriter textWriter = new
StringWriterWithEncoding(System.Text.Encoding.UTF8 );

XmlWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(textWriter);

serialiser.Serialize(writer, tp1Event);

strData = textWriter.ToString();

return strData;

}

[Oleg Tkachenko [MVP]]

Waldy wrote:

So even though I am using a string writer encoded to UTF-8, the fact that I
assign it to a string is enough to set it back to UTF-16?
Strings are always in UTF-16. And so you can't change encoding for
StringWriter class - it's always UTF-16.
StringWriterWithEncoding(System.Text.Encoding.UTF8 );

AFAIR this class is a particlular hack which helps to produce UTF-16
encoded string containing different encoding in XML declaration. I
wouldn't recommend using it, just google for it to see why.
If you need other than UTF-16 encoding, use MemoryStream instead.

--
Oleg Tkachenko [XML MVP, MCP]
http://blog.tkachenko.com

[Waldy]

"Oleg Tkachenko [MVP]" <oleg@NO!SPAM!PLEASEtkachenko.com> wrote in message
news:ut**************@TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...

If you need other than UTF-16 encoding, use MemoryStream instead.

And put it into a byte array instead of a string?

[Oleg Tkachenko [MVP]]

Waldy wrote:

And put it into a byte array instead of a string?

Yep. Or leave it in UTF-16 and encode to UTF-8 only when serializing to
file or whatever.

--
Oleg Tkachenko [XML MVP, MCP]
http://blog.tkachenko.com