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upper shoal Jul 28, 2025, 3:32 PM

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Hello guys! First timer here and begginer on GO!

I am now working on a project where I have a XML that gets generated by PHC and my GO code must read that file, authenticate via Graph API and send an email with the contents of said XML. However, I am having a lot of trouble with encoding.
When I receive the email (for testing purposes) it is all out of format.
I've read that GO uses UTF-8 by default, but I the XML I receive is formated with iso-8859-1 and apparently (not quite sure) Graph API also "stamps" the email with a Windows-1252 encoding.

I am desperate because I can't solve this issue and i've tried for 2 whole days and even asked ChatGPT for help but it didnt do much.

Some help would be very much appreciated!

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File Enconding

cerulean turtle Jul 29, 2025, 12:17 AM

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If the first 4 bytes are valid UTF-8 then it should be read as UTF-8. The optional encoding attribute in the header will tell you if it's not UTF-8.

cerulean turtle Jul 29, 2025, 12:37 AM

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Are you parsing the XML or do you only want to attach it to an e-mail?

swift oxide Jul 29, 2025, 6:36 AM

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example for cp1252 https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/text/encoding#example-package-DecodeWindows1252

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and ISO8859_1 for the other

upper shoal Jul 29, 2025, 10:33 AM

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cerulean turtle Are you parsing the XML or do you only want to attach it to an e-mail?

I am parsing it. the XML contains the "from" "to" and "body" of the email. I read that info and send the emai via Graph API

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@swift oxide but will I need to do it twice? Or just for the encoding of the XML?

swift oxide Jul 29, 2025, 1:54 PM

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why twice? you do it for stuff that isn’t already utf8

cerulean turtle Jul 29, 2025, 2:34 PM

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upper shoal I am parsing it. the XML contains the "from" "to" and "body" of the email. I rea...

So you'll need to do configure the decoder to decode the XML properly:

    decoder := xml.NewDecoder(r)
    decoder.CharsetReader = charset.NewReaderLabel

You need to import "golang.org/x/net/html/charset"

That will decode the XML in ISO-8859-1 if it has been encoded properly in the first place.

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Does the XML use namespaces?

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Can you provide a minimum viable example of what the XML looks like and I might be able to help you.
Just strip out the sensitive info. Just put in dummy addresses and text etc.

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Also, don't forget to set the content type when you send the e-mail. Go will output strings in UTF-8 unless you make it output something different.

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