Webservice returns XmlDocument with wrong encoding

[Francisco J. Martinez]

Hi.

Im writing a web service that returns an XML Document that it retrieves from
a file in disk or a stream. But the web service always returns the XML
document with this header:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

This happens even when the file in disk already has a header specifying a
different encoding. Here's a part of the web service code:

[WebMethod]
public XmlDocument GetXML( )
{
XmlDocument xmld = new XmlDocument();
xmld.Load(path); // path is a string with the url to the XML file in disk
return doc;
}

The rest of the XML is delivered without change. I've specified the XML's
encoding like this:

XmlDeclaration decl = (XmlDeclaration) xmld.FirstChild;
decl.Encoding = "ISO-8859-1";

I always get the same utf-8 encoding header at the output. Any ideas on
what's wrong?