C# Convert string from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 (Latin1) H

Question

I have googled on this topic and I have looked at every answer, but I still don't get it.

Basically I need to convert UTF-8 string to ISO-8859-1 and I do it using following code:

Encoding iso = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1"); Encoding utf8 = Encoding.UTF8; string msg = iso.GetString(utf8.GetBytes(Message)); 

My source string is

Message = "ÄäÖöÕõÜü" 

But unfortunately my result string becomes

msg = "�ä�ö�õ�ü 

What I'm doing wrong here?

Answer 1

Use Encoding.Convert to adjust the byte array before attempting to decode it into your destination encoding.

Encoding iso = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1"); Encoding utf8 = Encoding.UTF8; byte[] utfBytes = utf8.GetBytes(Message); byte[] isoBytes = Encoding.Convert(utf8, iso, utfBytes); string msg = iso.GetString(isoBytes); 

Answer 2

I think your problem is that you assume that the bytes that represent the utf8 string will result in the same string when interpreted as something else (iso-8859-1). And that is simply just not the case. I recommend that you read this excellent article by Joel spolsky.