Question

I was surprised when I encountered it, and wrote a console application to check it and make sure I wasn’t doing anything else.

Can anyone explain this?

Here’s the code:

using System;    
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Serialization;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    public class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var o = new SomeObject { Field1 = "string value", Field2 = 8 };

            Console.WriteLine("ObjectToXmlViaStringBuilder");
            Console.Write(ObjectToXmlViaStringBuilder(o));
            Console.WriteLine();
            Console.WriteLine();
            Console.WriteLine("ObjectToXmlViaStream");
            Console.Write(StreamToString(ObjectToXmlViaStream(o)));
            Console.ReadKey();
        }

        public static string ObjectToXmlViaStringBuilder(SomeObject someObject)
        {
            var output = new StringBuilder();
            var settings = new XmlWriterSettings { Encoding = Encoding.UTF8, Indent = true };

            using (var xmlWriter = XmlWriter.Create(output, settings))
            {
                var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(SomeObject));
                var namespaces = new XmlSerializerNamespaces();

                xmlWriter.WriteStartDocument();
                xmlWriter.WriteDocType("Field1", null, "someObject.dtd", null);
                namespaces.Add(string.Empty, string.Empty);
                serializer.Serialize(xmlWriter, someObject, namespaces);
            }

            return output.ToString();
        }

        private static string StreamToString(Stream stream)
        {
            var reader = new StreamReader(stream);
            return reader.ReadToEnd();
        }

        public static Stream ObjectToXmlViaStream(SomeObject someObject)
        {
            var output = new MemoryStream();
            var settings = new XmlWriterSettings { Encoding = Encoding.UTF8, Indent = true };

            using (var xmlWriter = XmlWriter.Create(output, settings))
            {
                var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(SomeObject));
                var namespaces = new XmlSerializerNamespaces();

                xmlWriter.WriteStartDocument();
                xmlWriter.WriteDocType("Field1", null, "someObject.dtd", null);
                namespaces.Add(string.Empty, string.Empty);
                serializer.Serialize(xmlWriter, someObject, namespaces);
            }

            output.Seek(0L, SeekOrigin.Begin);

            return output;
        }

        public class SomeObject
        {
            public string Field1 { get; set; }
            public int Field2 { get; set; }
        }
    }
}

This is the result:

ObjectToXmlViaStringBuilder

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<!DOCTYPE Field1 SYSTEM "someObject.dtd">
<SomeObject>
<Field1>string value</Field1>
<Field2>8</Field2>
</SomeObject>

ObjectToXmlViaStream

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE Field1 SYSTEM "someObject.dtd">
<SomeObject>
<Field1>string value</Field1>
<Field2>8</Field2>
</SomeObject>

Answer 1

When you create an XmlWriter around a TextWriter, the XmlWriter always uses the encoding of the underlying TextWriter. The encoding of a StringWriter is always UTF-16, since that’s how .NET strings are encoded internally.

When you create an XmlWriter around a Stream, there is no encoding defined for the Stream, so it uses the encoding specified in the XmlWriterSettings.