Match.Value and international characters

c#, encoding, regex, rtf

Solution

In what context are you doing this?

string example_text = "<em>Ich bin ein Bärliner</em>";
Regex em = new Regex(@"<em>[^<]*</em>" );
Match emMatch = em.Match(example_text);
while (emMatch.Success)
{
    Console.WriteLine(emMatch.Value);
    emMatch = emMatch.NextMatch();
}

This outputs `<em>Ich bin ein Bärliner</em>` in my console

The problem probably isn't that you're getting the wrong value back, it's that you're getting a representation of the value that isn't displayed correctly. This can depend on a lot of things. Try writing the value to a text file using UTF8 encoding and see if it still is incorrect.

Edit: Right. The thing is that you are getting the text from a WinForms `RichTextBox` using the `Rtf` property. This will not return the text as is, but will return the RTF representation of the text. RTF is not plain text, it's a markup format to display rich text. If you open an RTF document in e.g. Notepad you will see that it has a lot of weird codes in it - including `\'e4` for every 'ä' in your RTF document. If you would've used some markup (like bold text, color etc) in the RTF box, the `.Rtf` property would return that code as well, looking something like `{\rtlch\fcs1 \af31507 \ltrch\fcs0 \cf6\insrsid15946317\charrsid15946317 test}`

So use the `.Text` property instead. It will return the actual plain text.

Problem

UPDATE May this post be helpful for coders using RichTextBoxes. The Match is correct for a normal string, I did not see this AND I did not see that "ä" transforms to "\e4r" in the richTextBox.Rtf! So the Match.Value is correct - human error. A RegEx finds the correct text but Match.Value is wrong because it replaces the german "ä" with "\'e4"! Let example_text = "Primär-ABC" and lets use the following code ``` String example_text = "<em>Primär-ABC</em>"; Regex em = new Regex(@"<em>[^<]*</em>" ); Match emMatch = em.Match(example_text); //Works! Match emMatch = em.Match(richtextBox.RTF); //Fails! while (emMatch.Success) { string matchValue = emMatch.Value; Foo(matchValue) ... } ``` then the emMatch.Value returns "Prim\'e4r-ABC" instead of "Primär-ABC". The German ä transforms to \'e4! Because I want to work with the exact string, i would need emMatch.Value to be Primär-ABC - how do I achieve that?

Original source