Question

I have string that displays UTF-8 encoded characters, and I want to convert it back to Unicode.

For now, my implementation is the following:

public static string DecodeFromUtf8(this string utf8String)
{
    // read the string as UTF-8 bytes.
    byte[] encodedBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(utf8String);

    // convert them into unicode bytes.
    byte[] unicodeBytes = Encoding.Convert(Encoding.UTF8, Encoding.Unicode, encodedBytes);

    // builds the converted string.
    return Encoding.Unicode.GetString(encodedBytes);
}

I am playing with the word "déjà". I have converted it into UTF-8 through this online tool, and so I started to test my method with the string "déjÃ".

Unfortunately, with this implementation the string just remains the same.

Where am I wrong?

Answer 1

So the issue is that UTF-8 code unit values have been stored as a sequence of 16-bit code units in a C# string. You simply need to verify that each code unit is within the range of a byte, copy those values into bytes, and then convert the new UTF-8 byte sequence into UTF-16.

public static string DecodeFromUtf8(this string utf8String)
{
    // copy the string as UTF-8 bytes.
    byte[] utf8Bytes = new byte[utf8String.Length];
    for (int i=0;i<utf8String.Length;++i) {
        //Debug.Assert( 0 <= utf8String[i] && utf8String[i] <= 255, "the char must be in byte's range");
        utf8Bytes[i] = (byte)utf8String[i];
    }

    return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(utf8Bytes,0,utf8Bytes.Length);
}

DecodeFromUtf8("d\u00C3\u00A9j\u00C3\u00A0"); // déjà

This is easy, however it would be best to find the root cause; the location where someone is copying UTF-8 code units into 16 bit code units. The likely culprit is somebody converting bytes into a C# string using the wrong encoding. E.g. Encoding.Default.GetString(utf8Bytes, 0, utf8Bytes.Length).

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Alternatively, if you’re sure you know the incorrect encoding which was used to produce the string, and that incorrect encoding transformation was lossless (usually the case if the incorrect encoding is a single byte encoding), then you can simply do the inverse encoding step to get the original UTF-8 data, and then you can do the correct conversion from UTF-8 bytes:

public static string UndoEncodingMistake(string mangledString, Encoding mistake, Encoding correction)
{
    // the inverse of `mistake.GetString(originalBytes);`
    byte[] originalBytes = mistake.GetBytes(mangledString);
    return correction.GetString(originalBytes);
}

UndoEncodingMistake("d\u00C3\u00A9j\u00C3\u00A0", Encoding(1252), Encoding.UTF8);