How to detect text message body Charset

Question

i need for storing message body in database know encoding (charset) of message body. I am using s/mime MailMessage object for working with messages. This object has property DefaultCharset but after MailMessage.Load(filename) is this property empty. In saved message i see in begining of mime body part this: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-2; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable How to get charset information for body part?

Answer 1

To get charset information for message body parts, use the MailMessage objects's AlternateViews collection to access the body parts and get the charset information from their ContentType property:

C#:

Encoding encoding = mail.AlternateViews[i].ContentType.Encoding;

VB.NET:

Dim encoding As Encoding = mail.AlternateViews(i).ContentType.Encoding

However, if you simply use MailMessage object's BodyText and BodyHtml properties to retrieve the body, you get a .NET string in an already-decoded form.

(The MailMessage object's DefaultCharset property is only used when constructing and saving e-mail messages.)

Comments

Thank you for quick answer. You say "BodyText and BodyHtml properties are alredy decoded". In which charset are they decoded?

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In .NET, all strings (instances of System.String class) use Unicode internally. From the application's point-of-view, this doesn't really matter: - BodyText and BodyHtml are .NET strings - they have been decoded from the mail message body using the appropriate charset. - If your database (and its .NET provider) is capable of storing any System.String value, you don't need to specify or store any charset info. - If you are storing strings as byte arrays instead, you are free to use any charset, as long as it can represent all Unicode characters (so both UTF-8 or UTF-7 are suitable as well).

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Thank you this is the knowledge which i need. ;)