When receiving chinese string, I only get unusable characters

Question

I am using an textreader from the internet to read Chinese text, but I'm receiving incorrect letters.

For example, I get back æ‚¨å¥½ ï¼ instead of 轉注字. Also, if I parse German strings, I receive Sie kÃ¶nnen instead of Sie können.

This is the original string from website:

<string xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/">Sie kÃ¶nnen einige Blumen auswÃ¤hlen</string>

It is UTF-8 encoded. How do I resolve this encoding issue?

Regards

This looks like some UTF-8 encoded byte stream was decoded using a 8-bit encoding (probably one of the ISO-8859-* family or of its Windows-* counterparts). I don't know enough about .NET to tell you the correct way, however. — Joachim Sauer
damn stackoverflow restriction that I am not allowed to answer with fully comments!!! — goldengel
Thanks for ideas. The problem was the Webbrowser uses > iso-8859-1 to decode stuff as standard. I needed to use UTF-8 instead but did not exactly know. I thought it was reversed. The solution is, to just set the browsers encoding before downloading the string (no binary download needed). — goldengel
damn stackoverlow restriction that I can not format because I need to wait for 8 hours to answer the question. How should others know that I already found a good answer? — goldengel
... ' Dim U As Uri = CreateUri(item.German) Me.Web.Encoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8 ' System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(1252) 'System.Text.Encoding.ASCII ' System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1") Me.Web.DownloadStringAsync(U) ' Result is: > Ich pflücke glücklich blümchen which is correct! — goldengel

Daniel Hilgarth Daniel Hilgarth · Accepted Answer · 2011-05-17T07:55:16

Try to initialize your TextReader with the appropriate encoding:

using(var reader = new StreamReader(stream, Encoding.UTF8)
{
    // read the text
}