How do I extract UTF-8 strings out of a JSON file using LitJSON, as JsonData does not seem to convert?

Question

I've tried many methods to extract some strings out of a JSON file using LitJson in Unity.

I've encoding converts all over, tried getting byte arrays and sending them around and nothing seems to work.

I went to the very start of where I create the JsonData object and tried to run the following test:

public JsonData CreateJSONDataObject()
{
    Debug.Assert(pathName != null, "No JSON Data path name set. Please set before commencing read.");
    string jsonString = File.ReadAllText(Application.dataPath + pathName, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8);        
    JsonData jsonDataObject = JsonMapper.ToObject(jsonString);
    Debug.Log("Test compatibility: ë | " + jsonDataObject["Roots"][2]["name"]);
    return jsonDataObject;
}

I made sure my jsonString is using UTF-8, however the output shows this:

Test compatibility: ë | W�den

I've tried many other methods, but as this is making sure to encode right when creating a JsonData object I can't think of what I am doing wrong as I just don't know enough about JSON.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

This type of problem occurs when a text file is written with one encoding and read using a different one. I was able to reproduce your problem with the following program, which removes the JSON serialization from the equation entirely:

string file = @"c:\temp\test.txt";
string text = "Wöden";
File.WriteAllText(file, text, Encoding.Default));
string text2 = File.ReadAllText(file, Encoding.UTF8);
Debug.WriteLine(text2);

Since you are reading with UTF-8 and it is not working, the real question is, what encoding was used to write the file originally? You should be using the same encoding to read it back. I suspect that the file was originally created using either Windows-1252 or iso-8859-1 instead of UTF-8. Try using one of those when you read the file, e.g.:

string jsonString = File.ReadAllText(Application.dataPath + pathName,
                                     Encoding.GetEncoding("Windows-1252"));

---

You said in the comments that your JSON file was not created programmatically, but was "written by hand", meaning you used Notepad or some other text editor to make the file. If that is so, then that explains how you got into this situation. When you save the file, you should have the option to choose an encoding. For Notepad at least, the default encoding is "ANSI", which most likely maps to Windows-1252 (Western European), but depends on your locale. If you are in the Baltic region, for example, it would be Windows-1257 (Baltic). In any case, "ANSI" is not UTF-8. If you want to save the file in UTF-8 encoding, you have to specifically choose that option. Whatever option you use to save the file, that is the encoding you need to use to read it the next time, whether it is with a text editor or with code. Using the wrong encoding to read the file is what causes the corruption.

To change the encoding of a file, you first have to read it in using the same encoding that it was saved in originally, and then you can write it back out using a different encoding. You can do that with your text editor, simply by re-saving the file with a different encoding, or you can do that programmatically:

string text = File.ReadAllText(file, originalEncoding);
File.WriteAllText(file, text, newEncoding); 

The key is knowing which encoding was used originally, and therein lies the rub. For legacy encodings (such as Windows-12xx) there is no way to tell because there is no marker in the file which identifies it. Unicode encodings (e.g. UTF-8, UTF-16), on the other hand, do write out a marker at the beginning of the file, called a BOM, or byte-order mark, which can be detected programmatically. That, coupled with the fact that Unicode encodings can represent all characters, is why they are much preferred over legacy encodings.

For more information, I highly recommend reading What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets To Work With Text.