Question

I have an XML document file.xml which is encoded in Iso-latin-15 (aka Iso-Latin-9)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-15"?>
<root xmlns="http://stackoverflow.com/demo">
  <f>€.txt</f>
</root>

From my favorite text editor, I can tell this file is correctly encoded in Iso-Latin-15 (it is not UTF-8).

My software is written in C# and wants to extract the element f.

XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
xmlDoc.Load("file.xml"); 

In real life, I have a XMLResolver to set credentials. But basically, my code is as simple as that. The loading goes smoothly, I don’t have any exception raised.

Now, my problem when I extract the value:

//xnsm is the XmlNameSpace manager
XmlNode n = xmlDoc.SelectSingleNode("//root/f", xnsm); 
if (n != null)
  String filename = n.InnerText;

The Visual Studio debugger displays filename = □.txt

It could only be a Visual Studio bug. Unfortunately File.Exists(filename) returns false, whereas the file actually exist.

What’s wrong?

Answer 1

Don’t just use the debugger or the console to display the string as a string.

Instead, dump the contents of the string, one character at a time. For example:

foreach (char c in filename)
{
    Console.WriteLine("{0}: {1:x4}", c, (int) c);
}

That will show you the real contents of the string, in terms of Unicode code points, instead of being constrained by what the current font can display.

Use the Unicode code charts to look up the characters specified.