Question

I’m reading an XML file from a REST web service, parsing it, and displaying the details in a UITableView. The XML file is in encoded as iso-8859-1 and contains accented characters. If I just add the string to the tableview then I get a junk character displayed, so I’ve tried to convert it to UTF8 but it gets converted to a question mark, implying it doesn’t understand the character.

Here’s the code:

foreach(XmlNode myNode in myNodeList)
{
    Encoding isoEnc = Encoding.GetEncoding ("iso-8859-1");

    string utfResult = Encoding.UTF8.GetString (isoEnc.GetBytes(myNode.InnerText));

    _myCollection.Add(utfResult);
}

Any ideas what’s going on here, and how to display the accented chars?

Answer 1

OK, problem now solved. It seems that my error was assuming that the StreamReader would deal with the iso-8859-1 encoding by default. I changed my StreamReader constructor from:

StreamReader reader = new StreamReader (response.GetResponseStream ());

to:

StreamReader reader = new StreamReader (response.GetResponseStream (), Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1"));

By telling the StreamReader to expect the correct encoding, everything else just falls into place.