Use UTF-8 encoding for StringWriter in C#

All .NET string is in Unicode (UTF-16) encoding format. So when you are using StringWriter to create your XML it will use UTF-16 encoding. Example when creating XML : var serializer = new XmlSerializer(yourModel.GetType(), string.Empty); var stringBuilder = new StringBuilder(); using (var stringWriter = new StringWriter()) { serializer.Serialize(stringWriter, yourModel); stringBuilder.Append(stringWriter); } var resultString = stringBuilder.ToString(); But you want your XML to use UTF-8 encoding. One good way of doing this is to derive the StringWriter class and override the encoding. using System.IO; using System.Text; public sealed class ExtentedStringWriter : StringWriter { private readonly Encoding stringWriterEncoding; public ExtentedStringWriter(StringBuilder builder, Encoding desiredEncoding) : base(builder) { this.stringWriterEncoding = desiredEncoding; } public override Encoding Encoding { get { return this.stringWriterEncoding; } } } Then you can use ExtendedStringWriter instead of StringWriter in the above example. » Read more