C# WebClient UTF-8 woes...

[MichaelSchoeler]

Hi,

I'm having problems with the WebClient class regarding UTF-8 encoded data.

When I access a specific webservice directly I can see the data arrives in corretly formatted UTF-8. But when I try to pull data from the same webservice url through the WebClient class I get partly garbled UTF-8 data in return. Only some UTF-8 chars (double byte pairs) seems to be corrupted.

// Does not work
WebClient wc = new WebClient();
string postResult = wc.DownloadString( wsUrl );
Response.ContentType = "text/xml; charset=utf-8";
Response.Write(postResult);

The above code fails to deliver the data correctly, the below however does the job:

// Works, but its an ugly hack!
WebClient wc = new WebClient();
string postResult = wc.DownloadString( wsUrl );
postResult = postResult.Replace("Ã…", "Å");
postResult = postResult.Replace("Ø", "Ø");
postResult = postResult.Replace("ß", "ß");
Response.ContentType = "text/xml; charset=utf-8";
Response.Write(postResult);

Setting the encoding specifically to UTF-8 on the WebClient does not do the trick:

// Does not work either
WebClient wc = new WebClient();
wc.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
string postResult = wc.DownloadString( wsUrl );
Response.ContentType = "text/xml; charset=utf-8";
Response.Write(postResult);

UTF-8 encoded foreign chars such as "ø", "å", "æ", "ä", "ö", ... works great in all of the three code variants above.

My guess is that UTF-8 chars from "0xc3 0xa0" to "0xc3 0xbf" are treated ok by WebClient, whereas chars in the range "0xc3 0x80" to "0xc3 0x9f" are not :-(

Any clue / advice would be greatly appreciated!

Best regards,
Michael Schøler
Denmark

[gcthompson]

I fixed this by setting the encoding correctly on the client

wc.Encoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8;

[MichaelSchoeler]

October 2007 till September 2011... I guess I won't rate this answer "best". Besides, I answered it (or a similar matter) myself much much earlier:

http://www.xn--schler-dya.net/blog/2...datepanel_bug/