c# Detect xml encoding from Byte Array?

Question

Well i have a byte array, and i know its a xml serilized object in the byte array is there any way to get the encoding from it?

Im not going to deserilize it but im

Answer 1

You could look at the first 40-ish bytes¹. They should contain the document declaration (assuming it has an document declaration) which should either contain the encoding or you can assume it's UTF-8 or UTF-16, which should should be obvious from how you've understood the part. (Just check for both patterns.)

Realistically, do you expect you'll ever get anything other than UTF-8 or UTF-16? If not, you could check for the patterns you get at the start of both of those and throw an exception if it doesn't follow either pattern. Alternatively, if you want to make another attempt, you could always try to decode the document as UTF-8, re-encode it and see if you get the same bytes back. It's not ideal, but it might just work.

I'm sure there are more rigorous ways of doing this, but they're likely to be finicky :)

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¹ Quite possibly less than this. I figure 20 characters should be enough, which is 40 bytes in UTF-16.