Serializing an object as UTF-8 XML in .NET

Garry_Shutler_6369 0
Viewed 172798

Proper object disposal removed for brevity but I'm shocked if this is the simplest way to encode an object as UTF-8 in memory. There has to be an easier way doesn't there?

var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(SomeSerializableObject));

var memoryStream = new MemoryStream();
var streamWriter = new StreamWriter(memoryStream, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8);

serializer.Serialize(streamWriter, entry);

memoryStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
var streamReader = new StreamReader(memoryStream, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8);
var utf8EncodedXml = streamReader.ReadToEnd();
utf-8 xml-serialization xml c#
4 Answers

I found this blog post which explains the problem very well, and defines a few different solutions:

(dead link removed)

I've settled for the idea that the best way to do it is to completely omit the XML declaration when in memory. It actually is UTF-16 at that point anyway, but the XML declaration doesn't seem meaningful until it has been written to a file with a particular encoding; and even then the declaration is not required. It doesn't seem to break deserialization, at least.

As @Jon Hanna mentions, this can be done with an XmlWriter created like this:

XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create (output, new XmlWriterSettings() { OmitXmlDeclaration = true });
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