WebClient DownloadString UTF-8 not displaying international characters

Question

I attempt to save the html of a website in a string. The website has international characters (ę, ś, ć, ...) and they are not being saved to the string even though I set the encoding to be UTF-8 which corresponds to the websites charset.

Here is my code:

using (WebClient client = new WebClient())
{
    client.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
    string htmlCode = client.DownloadString("http://www.filmweb.pl/Mroczne.Widmo");
}

When I print "htmlCode" to the console, the international characters are not shown correctly even though in the original HTML they are shown correctly.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

I had the same problem. It seems that client.DownloadString doesn’t encode the characters using UTF-8. Using client.DownloadData and encoding the returned data with Encoding.UTF8.GetString solve the problem.

using (WebClient client = new WebClient())
{
     var htmlData = client.DownloadData("http://www.filmweb.pl/Mroczne.Widmo");
     var htmlCode = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(htmlData);
}