XmlException while parsing xml with encoding specified as "utf-16"

Question

I have an issue with parsing XML which has utf-16 encoding but it works perfectly fine with utf-8.
Can any help me out on this issue?.

I get the following error :

System.Web.HttpUnhandledException' was thrown.
System.Xml.XmlException: There is no Unicode byte order mark.
Cannot switch to Unicode

XML Header:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<RiskAssessmentRequestValue xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" 
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">

C# CODE BEHIND :

    rptTransformedXml.DataSource = parser.ExtractData(xml);
    rptTransformedXml.DataBind();


    public List<XmlDataExtract> ExtractData(string xml)
    {
        MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(xml));
        return ExtractData(stream);
    }


    public List<XmlDataExtract> ExtractData(Stream xmlStream)
    {
        XmlReaderSettings settings = new XmlReaderSettings
                                         {
                                             IgnoreComments = true,
                                             IgnoreWhitespace = true,
                                             CloseInput = true
                                         };

        XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(xmlStream, settings);
        XmlPathBuilder pathBuilder = new XmlPathBuilder(reader);
        List<XmlDataExtract> xmlDataList = new List<XmlDataExtract>();

        while (reader.Read())
        {
            if (reader.NodeType == XmlNodeType.XmlDeclaration)
                continue;
            pathBuilder.Add();
            CollectAttributeData(reader, xmlDataList, pathBuilder);
            CollectElementData(reader, xmlDataList, pathBuilder);
        }
        return xmlDataList;
    }

Solution

You can create an encoder based on the encoding of the xml content :

string encoding = "UTF-8"; // should match encoding in XML
string xml = @"<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?><table><row>1</row></table>";

var ms = new MemoryStream(Encoding.GetEncoding(encoding).GetBytes(xml));

var xdrs = new XmlReaderSettings()
    {IgnoreComments = true,
    IgnoreWhitespace = true,
    CloseInput = true};

var xdr = XmlReader.Create(ms, xdrs);
while (xdr.Read())
 {
    Console.Write("qqq");
 }

For more information about encoding, there is a related question