C# – How to transform string to UTF-8 in C#

ccharacter encodingencodingstringutf-8

I have a string that I receive from a third party app and I would like to display it correctly in any language using C# on my Windows Surface.

Due to incorrect encoding, a piece of my string looks like this in Spanish:

Acción

whereas it should look like this:

Acción

According to the answer on this question:
How to know string encoding in C#, the encoding I am receiving should be coming on UTF-8 already, but it is read on Encoding.Default (probably ANSI?).

I am trying to transform this string into real UTF-8, but one of the problems is that I can only see a subset of the Encoding class (UTF8 and Unicode properties only), probably because I'm limited to the windows surface API.

I have tried some snippets I've found on the internet, but none of them have proved successful so far for eastern languages (i.e. korean). One example is as follows:

var utf8 = Encoding.UTF8;
byte[] utfBytes = utf8.GetBytes(myString);
myString= utf8.GetString(utfBytes, 0, utfBytes.Length);

I also tried extracting the string into a byte array and then using UTF8.GetString:

byte[] myByteArray = new byte[myString.Length];
for (int ix = 0; ix < myString.Length; ++ix)
{
    char ch = myString[ix];
    myByteArray[ix] = (byte) ch;
}

myString = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(myByteArray, 0, myString.Length);

Do you guys have any other ideas that I could try?

Best Answer

As you know the string is coming in as Encoding.Default you could simply use:

byte[] bytes = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(myString);
myString = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(bytes);

Another thing you may have to remember: If you are using Console.WriteLine to output some strings, then you should also write Console.OutputEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8;!!! Or all utf8 strings will be outputed as gbk...

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