Question

If I encode the following string as UTF8:

café

It’s returned as 5 bytes instead of 4. I’d like it to return 4 bytes if possible.

Encoding encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
string testString = "café";
Byte[] bytes = encoding.GetBytes(testString);

Returns:

[0] 99
[1] 97
[2] 102
[3] 195
[4] 169

Whereas “cafe” returns only 4 bytes.

Answer 1

Ended up converting UTF8 to ISO8859-1 and it’s now returning 4 bytes instead of 5.

Encoding utf8 = Encoding.UTF8;
string testString = "café";
byte[] utfBytes = utf8.GetBytes(testString); // 5 bytes

Encoding iso = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1");
byte[] isoBytes = iso.GetBytes(testString); // 4 bytes
byte[] convertedUtf8Bytes = Encoding.Convert(utf8, iso, utfBytes); // 4 bytes

string msg = iso.GetString(isoBytes);
string msgConverted = iso.GetString(convertedUtf8Bytes);

Console.WriteLine(msg);
Console.WriteLine(msgConverted);

Outputs:

café

café