HttpWebRequest's response don't show UTF-8 symbols

Question

I have simple code for getting response from websites, but there is one small problem. I am trying to get response from Russian website and from one website I unknown symbols and from other I get normal text. Where might be problem ?

Response from: www.kinopoisk.ru

...

Response from: www.yandex.ru

Греция - Чехия. 1:2...

    HttpWebRequest http = (HttpWebRequest) HttpWebRequest.Create("http://");
    http.Timeout = 30000;
    http.KeepAlive = true;
    http.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
    http.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0";
    http.Accept = "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8";
    http.Proxy = null;

    WebResponse response = http.GetResponse();
    Stream istream = response.GetResponseStream();
    StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(istream);

    Response.Write(reader.ReadToEnd());

    reader.Close();

Answer 1

kinopoisk.ru is encoded as WINDOWS-1251 (you can see this in the Content-Type header).

You need to pass Encoding.GetEncoding(1251) to the StreamReader to decode that.

Answer 2

This is a charset issue. If you want to get the character set of response of your request HttpWebResponse class provides us a property named CharacterSet. This property returns the string type value.

myWebRequest = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(url);
myWebRequest.Method = "GET";
myWebResponse = (HttpWebResponse)myWebRequest.GetResponse();
string str = myWebResponse.CharacterSet;

If you want to get that which encoding method is used to encode the response, for this purpose we have a property of HttpWebRequest class named ContentEncoding. This property returns string value.

myWebRequest = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(url);
myWebRequest.Method = "GET";
myWebResponse = (HttpWebResponse)myWebRequest.GetResponse();
string str = myWebResponse.ContentEncoding;