XmlWriter and Encoding

This could have saved me some time today! http://hoolihan.net/blog-tim/2008/10/02/utf-8-encoding-with-xmlwriter-and-a-stringbuilder/ I’m new to PowerShell and this was hard work to find that it’s not my problem.

$enc = [System.Text.Encoding]::GetEncoding(28591) # iso-8859-1

# Using StringBuilder to form a valid XML file with encoding declaration
$builder = New-Object System.Text.StringBuilder
$stringWriter = New-Object System.IO.StringWriter($builder)

$settings = New-Object System.XML.XmlWriterSettings
$settings.Encoding = $enc
$settings.Indent = $true
$settings.CloseOutput = $false
$settings.CheckCharacters = $true

Write-Host $settings.Encoding

$writer = [System.XML.XmlWriter]::Create($builder, $settings)

Write-Host $writer.Settings.Encoding

$xmlDoc.AppendChild($xmlData)

$xmlDoc.Save($writer) # Save the XML into the $writer object
$writer.Close()
$stringWriter.Dispose()

I created a settings object to set the encoding I wanted and then passed that into XmlWriter::Create but it gets totally ignored and reverts back to default UnicodeEncoding.

Output:

System.Text.Latin1Encoding
System.Text.UnicodeEncoding

So the settings value is Latin1Encoding, but once it reaches the other side of the XmlWriter::Create it has become UnicodeEncoding. The result is every XML file I create has encoding="utf-16" in the declaration.