Question

An ASP.NET page (ashx) receives a GET request with a UTF8 string. It reads a SqlServer database with Windows-1255 data.

I can’t seem to get them to work together. I’ve used information gathered on SO (mainly Convert a string's character encoding from windows-1252 to utf-8) as well as msdn on the subject.

When I run anything through the functions below – it always ends up the same as it started – not converted at all.

Is something done wrong?

EDIT

What I’m specifically trying to do (getData returns a Dictionary<int, string>):

getData().Where(a => a.Value.Contains(context.Request.QueryString["q"]))

Result is empty, unless I send a “neutral” character such as “‘” or “,”.

CODE

    string windows1255FromUTF8(string p)
    {
        Encoding win = Encoding.GetEncoding(1255);
        Encoding utf8 = Encoding.UTF8;

        byte[] utfBytes = utf8.GetBytes(p);
        byte[] winBytes = Encoding.Convert(utf8, win, utfBytes);
        return win.GetString(winBytes);
    }

    string UTF8FromWindows1255(string p)
    {
        Encoding win = Encoding.GetEncoding(1255);
        Encoding utf8 = Encoding.UTF8;

        byte[] winBytes = win.GetBytes(p);
        byte[] utfBytes = Encoding.Convert(win, utf8, winBytes);
        return utf8.GetString(utfBytes);
    }

Answer 1

For some reason this worked:

byte[] fromBytes = (fromEncoding.UTF8).GetBytes(myString);
string finalString = (Encoding.GetEncoding(1255)).GetString(fromBytes);

Switching encoding without the conversion…