C# convert ISO-8859-1 characters to entity number

Question

I can't seem to figure out how to convert ISO-8859-1 characters, such as é, to it's entity number being é.

I want to be able to take a string, such as: "Steel Décor"

and have it converted to: "Steel Décor"

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 25 '10 at 16:27

Assuming you don't care about HTML-encoding characters that are special in HTML (e.g., <, &, etc.), a simple loop over the string will work:

string input = "Steel Décor";
StringBuilder output = new StringBuilder();
foreach (char ch in input)
{
    if (ch > 0x7F)
        output.AppendFormat("&#{0};", (int) ch);
    else
        output.Append(ch);
}
// output.ToString() == "Steel D&#233;cor"

The if statement may need to be changed to also escape characters < 0x20, or non-alphanumeric, etc., depending on your exact needs.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 25 '10 at 15:09

1

HttpUtility.HtmlEncode does that. It resides in System.Web.dll though so won't work with .NET 4 Client Profile for example.

answered Nov 25 '10 at 15:09

liggett78

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1

It does and it doesn't. It encodes the string, but not in the text format i'm looking for. It was the first thing i tried. I'm also not working with web stuff. – tracstarr Nov 25 '10 at 18:37

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 25 '11 at 07:07

using LINQ

string toDec(string input)
{
    Dictionary<string, char> resDec =
        (from p in input.ToCharArray() where p > 127 select p).Distinct().ToDictionary(
            p => String.Format(@"&#x{0:D};", (ushort)p));

    foreach (KeyValuePair<string, char> pair in resDec)
        input = input.Replace(pair.Value.ToString(), pair.Key);
    return input;
}

C# convert ISO-8859-1 characters to entity number

3 Answers3

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