Should I be worried about encoding during serialization?

Question

public string Serialize(BackgroundJobInfo info)
{
    var stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
    using (var stringWriter = new StringWriter(stringBuilder, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture))
    {
        var writer = XmlWriter.Create(stringWriter);
        ...

By default, StringWriter will advertise itself as being in UTF-16. Usually XML is in UTF-8. So I can fix this by subclassing StringWriter

public class Utf8StringWriter : StringWriter
{
    public override Encoding Encoding
    {
         get { return Encoding.UTF8; }
    }
}

But why should I worry about that? What will be if I decide to use StringWriter(like I did) instead of Utf8StringWriter? Will I have some bug?

After that I will write this string to MongoDb

Do the answers to this question help? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13743250/meaning-of-xml-version-1-0-encoding-utf-8 — Gabriel Sadaka, Mar 11 '16 at 10:07

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 11 '16 at 10:11

StringWriter's Encoding property actually is not that useful, as the underlying thing it writes to is a StringBuilder, which produces a .Net string. .Net strings are encoded internally in utf16, but that's an implementation detail you don't have to worry about. Encoding is just a property inherited from TextWriter, because a TextWriter can potentially write to targets where encoding does matter (Stream, byte[], ...).

In the end, you will end up with a plain old string. The encoding you will use to serialize that string later on is not fixed yet, and if you're using a MongoDb client implementation that takes a string as an argument, it is not even your concern!

On a side note, overriding the getter of the Encodingproperty would not change the way encoding would happen inside even if encoding was actually involved in StringWriter

Should I be worried about encoding during serialization?

1 Answers1