www.RickLaFleur.com

Another post to document something that I really don't want to have to look up ever again. I simply wanted to output XML to the browser window using ASP.NET MVC. Sounds easy, simply use:

public ContentResult Index()
{
    StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
    myXmlDocument.Save(writer);
    return this.Content(writer.ToString(), @"text/xml", writer.Encoding);
}

But no luck; IE7's CSS would not display the XML since IIS ASP.NET defaults to UTF-16 and the previous page was UTF-8? Yes, both pages were correctly tagged with there encoding and correctly identified by IE as UTF-8 or UTF-16. It just wouldn't process the later. Whats up with that; can't these MS kids get along. So did a search and found a soluiton posted by Robert McLaw using a modified StringWriter that accepted an encoding which would worked very nicely:

public class StringWriterWithEncoding : StringWriter
{
Encoding encoding;
public StringWriterWithEncoding(Encoding encoding)
{
  this.encoding = encoding;
}
public override Encoding Encoding
{
  get { return encoding; }
}
}

To implement, just use the new writer and set it's encoding as desired:

public ContentResult Index()
{
   StringWriterWithEncoding writer = new StringWriterWithEncoding(Encoding.UTF8);
   myXmlDocument.Save(writer);
   return this.Content(writer.ToString(), @"text/xml", writer.Encoding);
}

Labels: code csharp

posted by RickLaFleur.com  # Tuesday, January 26, 2010