Question

I have a MS SQL query that returns a UTF-8 encoded field (a varchar). How do I convert it to a .NET Unicode string? UTF8Encoding.GetString will do the job … if you have an array of bytes – I don’t.

Answer 1

Adapted a possible solution from this question: C# Convert string from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 (Latin1) H

var dbEnc = Encoding.UTF8;
var uniEnc = Encoding.Unicode;
byte[] dbBytes = dbEnc.GetBytes(dbString);
byte[] uniBytes = Encoding.Convert(dbEnc, uniEnc, dbBytes);
string msg = uniEnc.GetString(uniBytes);

Does this help?