C# convert ISO-8859-1 characters to entity number

Question

I can't seem to figure out how to convert ISO-8859-1 characters, such as é, to it's entity number being é.

I want to be able to take a string, such as: "Steel Décor"

and have it converted to: "Steel Décor"

Answer 1

Assuming you don't care about HTML-encoding characters that are special in HTML (e.g., <, &, etc.), a simple loop over the string will work:

string input = "Steel Décor";
StringBuilder output = new StringBuilder();
foreach (char ch in input)
{
    if (ch > 0x7F)
        output.AppendFormat("&#{0};", (int) ch);
    else
        output.Append(ch);
}
// output.ToString() == "Steel Décor"

The if statement may need to be changed to also escape characters < 0x20, or non-alphanumeric, etc., depending on your exact needs.