C# and HtmlAgilityPack encoding problem

Question

WebClient GodLikeClient = new WebClient();
HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument GodLikeHTML = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();

GodLikeHTML.Load(GodLikeClient.OpenRead("www.alfa.lt");

So this code returns: "Skaitytojo klausimas psichologui: kas lemia homoseksualumÄ…? - Naujienų portalas Alfa.lt" instead of "Skaitytojo klausimas psichologui: kas lemia homoseksualumą? - Naujienų portalas Alfa.lt".

This webpage is encoded in 1257 (baltic), but textBox1.Text = GodLikeHTML.DocumentNode.OuterHtml; returns the distorted text - baltic diacritics are transformed into some weird several characters long strings :(

And yes, I've tried the HtmlAgilityPack forums. They do suck.

P.S. I'm no programmer, but I work on a community project and I really need to get this code working. Thanks ;}

Answer 1

Actually the page is encoded with UTF-8.

GodLikeHTML.Load(GodLikeClient.OpenRead("http://www.alfa.lt"), Encoding.UTF8); 

will work.

Or you could use the code in my SO answer which detects encoding from http headers or meta tags, en re-encodes properly. (It also supports gzip to minimize your download).

With the download class your code would look like:

HttpDownloader downloader = new HttpDownloader("http://www.alfa.lt",null,null); GodLikeHTML.LoadHtml(downloader.GetPage()); 

Answer 2

I had a similar encoding problems. I fixed it, in the most current version of HtmlAgilityPack, by adding the following to my WebClient initialization.

var htmlWeb = new HtmlWeb();
htmlWeb.OverrideEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;
var doc = htmlWeb.Load("www.alfa.lt");

Answer 3

UTF8 didn't work for me, but after setting the encoding like this, most pages i was trying to scrape worked just wel:

web.OverrideEncoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1");

Perhaps it might help someone.