How to properly decode accented characters for display

Question

My raw input file text file contains a string:

Caf&eacute (Should be Café)

The text file is a UTF8 file.

The output lets say is to another text file, so its not necessarily for a web page.

What C# method(s) can i use to output the correct format, Café?

Apparently a common problem?

Solution 1

Have you tried System.Web.HttpUtility.HtmlDecode("Café")? it returns 538M results

Solution 2

This is HTML encoded text. You need to decode it:

string decoded = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(text);

UPDATE: french symbol "é" has HTML code "é" so, you need to fix your input string.

Solution 3

You should use SecurityElement.Escape when working with XML files.

HtmlEncode will encode a lot of extra entities that are not required. XML only requires that you escape >, <, &, ", and ', which SecurityElement.Escape does.

When reading the file back through an XML parser, this conversion is done for you by the parser, you shouldn't need to "decode" it.

EDIT: Of course this is only helpful when writing XML files.