Question

I’m trying to read xmls that I downloaded with the WebClient.OpenReadAsync() in a Windows Phone application. The problem is that sometimes, the xml won’t come with UTF8 Encoding, it might come with other encodings such as “ISO-8859-1”, so the accents come messed up.

I was able to load one of the ISO-8858-1 xmls perfectly using the code:

var buff = e.Result.ReadFully(); //Gets byte array from the stream
var resultBuff = Encoding.Convert(Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1"), Encoding.UTF8, buff);
var result = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(resultBuff, 0, resultBuff.Length);

It works beautifully with ISO-8859-1, the text came perfect after, but It messed up the UTF8 xmls.

So, the idea here is to detect the encoding of the byte array or the stream before doing this, then if it’s not UTF8, it will convert the data using the method above with the detected encoding.

I am searching for some method that can detect the encoding on the internet but I cannot find any!
Does anybody know how I could do this kind of thing on Windows Phone?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can look for the “Content-Type” value in the WebClient.ResponseHeaders property; If you are lucky the server is setting it to indicate the type of media plus its encoding (e.g. “text/html; charset=ISO-8859-4”).