XML encoding, which one? encoding="ISO-8859-1" or encoding="UTF-8"?

Question

I am working on an software application that uses Termbases. I'm only concerned with Western languages (EN, DE, FR, IT and ES) and I noticed that Web browsers don't render XML files (I get an "encoding error") when I use <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> but the XML file is rendered correctly when I use <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
The problem seems to be accented characters like á é í ó ú ñ à ê etc. My XML file comes from an XML string. I'm aware that ISO-8859-1 is deprecated and UTF-8 is practically the standard, but it doesn't work for me. Any suggestions? Thanks.

Frank Closset · Accepted Answer

That's because the actual encoding of your file is ANSI, and not unicode. 
 
To fix this, do the following: 
1. Open your file in notepad 
2. Click File > Save As... 
3. In the Save As dialog, change the encoding from ANSI to unicode or UTF-8

Raf Snijders · Answer

Depending on how the XML string is returned and which programming language you use, you can use either: 
 
----- saving your string a UTF-8 encoded file (in C#) ---- 
(sample taken from: stackoverflow.com/.../force-xdocument-to-write-to-string-with-utf-8-encoding) 
 
using System; 
using System.IO; 
using System.Text; 
using System.Xml.Linq; 
 
class Test 
{ 
 static void Main() 
 { 
 XDocument doc = XDocument.Parse("Your XML string"); 
 doc.Declaration = new XDeclaration("1.0", "utf-8", null); 
 StringWriter writer = new Utf8StringWriter(); 
 doc.Save(writer, SaveOptions.None); 
 Console.WriteLine(writer); 
 } 
 
 private class Utf8StringWriter : StringWriter 
 { 
 public override Encoding Encoding { get { return Encoding.UTF8; } } 
 } 
} 
 
------- end of code block -------- 
 
or you might just need to change the encoding 
 
----- converting ASCII to UTF-8 (in C#) code snippet (with additional comments from webpage)---- 
(sample taken from: stackoverflow.com/.../converting-problem-ansi-to-utf8-c-sharp) 
 
When you convert to ASCII you immediately lose all non-English characters (including ones with accent) because ASCII has only 127 (7 bits) of characters. 
 
I think you should do: (I guess by ANSI you mean Latin1)

public byte[] Encode(string text) 
{ 
 return Encoding.GetEncoding(1252).GetBytes(text); 
}

Since the question was not very clear there is a reasonable remark that you might actually need this one: 
 
public string Decode(byte[] data) 
{ 
 return Encoding.GetEncoding(1252).GetString(data); 
} 
 
------- end of code snippet (with additional comments from webpage) --------

So you might take this sample as a guidance and adjust it in order to have it working in you routines. 
 
If you use a different language, you might need to adjust the code further to comply with the routines offered by the programming language 
 
Kind Regards, 
 
Raf

Tridion Docs Developers > 03 - Developer Forum

XML encoding, which one? encoding="ISO-8859-1" or encoding="UTF-8"?