Question

I am using an RSS feed as a data source. I’ve adjusted how I retrive the data to use the WebClient.DownloadStringAsync method. Before I was using XmlReader.Create method. I’m then using the results as a data source to bind to a TextBlock in WPF.

Since I made the change when I display my results all the special encoded characters are appearing as odd characters. Would love some help making sure I keep the proper encoding so that my display values don’t have the odd characters.

// WebClient code...    
private void GetFeed(int i)
            {
                Uri _feedUri = new Uri(_feedList[i]); 
                webClient = new WebClient();
                webClient.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(stringStringCompletedEvent);
                webClient.DownloadStringAsync(_feedUri, _feedTokenList[i]);
            }
private void stringStringCompletedEvent(object sender, DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e)
        {
            if (e.Error == null)
            {

                string xmlString = e.Result;
                XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
                doc.LoadXml(xmlString);
                doc.Save(@"C:\CashierData\msnbc-top.xml");
            }
        }

Here is my previous code using XmlReader to download and parse the feed.

XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(feed, settings);

Answer 1

I suspect the problem is that the web server isn’t specifying the content encoding correctly.

You could use DownloadDataAsync instead, and then use

doc.Load(new MemoryStream(data));

(where data is the byte array). Then the XML parser will get to auto-detect the XML encoding from the binary data, instead of trusting the web server to know the right encoding.