Converting special charactes such as ü and à back to their original, latin alphbet counterparts in C#

Question

I have been given an export from a MySQL database that seems to have had it\'s encoding muddled somewhat over time and contains a mix of HTML char codes such as

Answer 1

The data is only partly unrecoverable due to Windows-1252 encoding having 5 unassigned slots. Some modifications of Windows-1252 fill these with control characters but those don't make it to posts in Stackoverflow. If modified Windows-1252 has been used you can fully recover as long as you don't lose the hidden control characters in copy pastes.

There is also the non-breaking space character that is ignored or turned into a space usually with copypastes, but that's not an issue when you deal with bytes directly.

The misencoding abuse this string has gone through is:

UTF-8 -> Windows-1252 -> UTF-8 -> Windows-1252

To recover, here is an example:

String a = "Desinfektionslösungstücher für Flächen";
Encoding utf8 = Encoding.GetEncoding(65001);
Encoding win1252 = Encoding.GetEncoding(1252);

string result = utf8.GetString(win1252.GetBytes(utf8.GetString(win1252.GetBytes(a))));

Console.WriteLine(result);
//Desinfektionslösungstücher für Flächen