How to Correctly Convert UTF-8 Strings to ISO-8859-1 in C#?

Correctly Handling UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 String Conversions in C#

Direct conversion of UTF-8 strings to ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) often results in data loss and character corruption. This is because UTF-8 uses variable-length encoding, while ISO-8859-1 is a fixed-length, single-byte encoding. Simply changing the encoding without proper byte conversion will lead to incorrect output.

The key to accurate conversion lies in using the Encoding.Convert method. This method properly maps the UTF-8 bytes to their ISO-8859-1 equivalents, handling any necessary transformations. Characters not present in ISO-8859-1 will be replaced with their best approximations or may be lost.

Here's the corrected C# code:

Encoding iso = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1");
Encoding utf8 = Encoding.UTF8;
string utf8String = "ÄäÖöÕõÜü"; // Example UTF-8 string
byte[] utf8Bytes = utf8.GetBytes(utf8String);
byte[] isoBytes = Encoding.Convert(utf8, iso, utf8Bytes);
string iso88591String = iso.GetString(isoBytes);

This code first gets the UTF-8 bytes from the original string. Then, Encoding.Convert transforms these bytes into a representation suitable for ISO-8859-1. Finally, the resulting byte array is decoded using the ISO-8859-1 encoding to produce the final string. Remember that any characters outside the ISO-8859-1 character set might be lost or replaced during this process.

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