How to make Stream.Write() output in UTF-8 format

Question

My issue is this:

I am generating and uploading a SQL file using ASP.NET, but after the file is saved to the FTP server, characters like ü are changed to &uul;, ø to ø and so on... How can I prevent this from happening? I don't want the file to be formatted with ASCII code, but with UTF-8.

The code that generates and uploads the file looks like this:

//request = the object to be made an request out of.
Stream requestStream = request.GetReguestStream();
var encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
//fileContent is the string to be saved in the file
byte[] buffer = encoding.GetBytes(fileContent); 
requestStream.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
requestStream.Close();

As you can see I've tried to use the System.Text.UTF8Encoding, but it doesn't work.

Answer 1

Remember, with streams you can almost always wrap the streams as necessary. If you want to write UTF-8 encoded content you wrap the request stream in a StreamWriter with the correct encoding:

using (Stream requestStream = request.GetRequestStream())
using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(requestStream, Encoding.UTF8)) {
  writer.Write(fileContent);
}

Since you say you're uploading to a web service be sure to set your content encoding as well. Since you haven't posted where the request object comes from, I'll assume it's a normal HttpWebRequest.

With a HttpWebRequest you would tell the server what the content encoding is by using the ContentType property.

request.ContentType = "text/plain;charset=utf-8";

As others have mentioned, though, the FTP transfer itself may be breaking it too. If you can, make sure it's transferred in binary mode, not ASCII mode.