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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T03:00:26+00:00

I am having problems with encoding in ID3 tags. I query a webservice which

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I am having problems with encoding in ID3 tags. I query a webservice which returns back some XML including a node such as the one below:

<name>Blue Öyster Cult</name>

I am then using this information to update my ID3 tags. The problem is that the tag is updated as:

Blue Öyster Cult

I know this is an encoding issue, but I’m struggling to work out how to get it to work. My understanding is that ID3 tags need to be encoded as ISO-8859-1.

I wrote this code, but it makes no difference:

Encoding newEncoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1");
Encoding utf8 = Encoding.UTF8;
byte[] utfBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(newArtistName);
byte[] asciBytes = Encoding.Convert(utf8, newEncoding, utfBytes);
string encodedArtistName = newEncoding.GetString(asciBytes);

Is this in the right direction or not?

Any advice much appreciated.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The issue that I was having was actually prior to saving to the ID3 tags. The XML I was receiving was set to UTF-8, but the WebClient requesting the page was not. Adding the second line shown here resolved the problem.

    WebClient client = new WebClient();    
client.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
String htmlCode = client.DownloadString(requestURL);

    When the value is extracting from this XML, it has the correct encoding to be saved to the files ID3 tag.

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