How to check if a string consists only of chars, which can be successfully encoded in ISO 8859-1? Or in other words - how to find "illegal"/"not ISO 8859-1 compatible" chars in a string?
2
- Would this post help?Mechanical Object– Mechanical Object2013-07-26 09:43:52 +00:00Commented Jul 26, 2013 at 9:43
- @MechanicalObject: Probably not, if it is already a C# String (and not raw bytes).Thilo– Thilo2013-07-26 09:45:25 +00:00Commented Jul 26, 2013 at 9:45
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3 Answers
Try this:
private static bool IsValidISO(string input) { byte[] bytes = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1").GetBytes(input); String result = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1").GetString(bytes); return String.Equals(input, result); } This answer is based on an answer of this Java question (my code is the C# equivalent): http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t137810-checking-whether-a-string-contains-only-iso-8859-1-chars.html
3 Comments
netblognet
This looks better than mine idea. Thanks for your answer!
user3094403
@netblognet You're welcome! I also looked at your code, but it looks "dangerous" because you can't be 100% sure that non-ISO chars will give a question mark. My code is also faster.
Oliver Voutat
Great answer. Small suggestion even if it is a really old post. Instead of Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1") use Encoding.Latin1
You could setup an array or list of valid characters and then iterate through your string to check if each of them exists in your list of valid characters. The list can be created by adding all valid latin-1 characters to it.
Comments
I came up with this idea. Might this be possible?
private static bool IsValidISO(string input) { foreach (char c in input) { Encoding iso = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1"); Encoding utf8 = Encoding.UTF8; byte[] isoBytes = iso.GetBytes(c.ToString()); byte[] utfBytes = Encoding.Convert(iso, utf8, isoBytes); string convertedC = utf8.GetString(utfBytes); if (c != '?' && convertedC == "?") return false; } return true; }