Laith Zraikat : Converting a string from UTF-8 to Windows-1256 encoding

I recently was faced with a problem where a form was sending text encoded in UTF-8, and the ASP.Net page processing the data used "windows-1256". This really messed up the text.

The dilemma I was that I had to keep the page encoding containing the form as utf-8, and I had to keep the processing page as windows-1256.

I was able to solve it by converting the incoming text from utf-8 to windows-1256 by using the following two methods:

///<summary>
/// Converts any UTF-8 string into the selected character set
///</summary>
///<param name="StringToConvert"></param>
///<param name="TargetCharSet"></param>
///<returns></returns>
public byte[] ConvertUTF8StringEncoding(string StringToConvert, string TargetCharSet)
{
byte[] ByteConvertedString;
byte[] ByteStringToConvert;
Encoding TargetEncoding;
// Convert the string to a Byte array
ByteStringToConvert = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(StringToConvert);
// Get the target encoding type
TargetEncoding = Encoding.GetEncoding(TargetCharSet);
// Convert the byte array using the target encoding
ByteConvertedString = Encoding.Convert(System.Text.Encoding.UTF8, TargetEncoding, ByteStringToConvert);
return ByteConvertedString;
}

///<summary>
/// This converts the Binary array back to string.
///</summary>
///<param name="Binary"></param>
///<returns></returns>
string BinaryUTF8ToString(byte[] Binary)
{
return System.Text.UnicodeEncoding.UTF8.GetString(Binary);
}

The first method will return a byte array of the string encoded in windows-1256. The second method will convert the binary array back to its string value.

So to convert any UTF-8 form input string, we write the following

stringConvertedString = BinaryUTF8ToString(ConvertStringEncoding(
Request.Form["FormInput"], "windows-1256"));