How do I have to change this XML string so that XDocument.Parse reads it in?

Question

In the following code, I serialize an object into an XML string.

But when I try to read this XML string into an XDocument

Answer 1

You can resolve your problem by using a StreamReader to convert the data in the MemoryStream to a string instead:

public static string SerializeObject<T>(object o)
{
    using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
    {
        XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
        using (XmlWriter xtw = XmlWriter.Create(ms))
        {
            xs.Serialize(xtw, o);
            xtw.Flush();
            ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
            using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(ms))
            {
                return reader.ReadToEnd();
            }
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

It's because the data contains the unicode or utf8 BOM marks at the start of the stream.

You need to skip past any Byte Order Marks in the stream - you can identify these from the System.Text.Encoding.GetPreamble() method.

Answer 3

All above is correct, and here is a code that you should use instead of yours to skip BOM:

 public static string SerializeObject<T>(object o)
        {
            MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
            XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
            //here is my code
            UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding(false);
            XmlTextWriter xtw = new XmlTextWriter(ms, encoding);
            //XmlTextWriter xtw = new XmlTextWriter(ms, Encoding.UTF8);
            xs.Serialize(xtw, o);
            ms = (MemoryStream)xtw.BaseStream;
            return StringHelpers.UTF8ByteArrayToString(ms.ToArray());
       }

By specifying false in the constructor you say "BOM is not provided". Enjoy! =)