File.Exists and the accentuation

Question

I have a system developed in Webforms (Eca!) that checks the existence of an image to then display it.

Everything is working correctly, however, when the image path has accents, the method File.Exists seems to be returning false.

What can I do to get around it?

Example:

 string img1 = Server.MapPath("\Fotos\Imagem.jpg");
 string img2 = Server.MapPath("\Fotos\Imagem-com-acentuação.jpg");

Console.WriteLine(File.Exists(img1)); // true
Console.WriteLine(File.Exists(img2)); // false

Update: I wrote and tested the existence of a manually accented file and it worked. I begin to suspect that the problem is in assembling the file path, which was done as follows:

string imgUrl = "~\\Fotos\\Fotos_" + Codigo + "\\" + e.Row.Cells[20].Text;

Answer 1

It is possible that the file name string is being encoded in HTML, you can reverse this by using HtmlEncode and HtmlDecode:

string arquivo = "Imagem-com-acentuação.jpg";

string codificada = Server.HtmlEncode(arquivo); //Imagem-com-acentuação.jpg

string decodificada = Server.HtmlDecode(codificada); //Imagem-com-acentuação.jpg

As you explained in the comments, the file name is already being passed encoded, so your code would look like this:

string img2 = Server.MapPath(Server.HtmlDecode(codificada));

Answer 2

I’ve seen a code here never class that lists a directory with a comment to "handle paths with accents". When I saw your question I remembered this and went after. This is the code (I wrote some path to illustrate):

var path = @"c:\teste\senão\término\um path com textão.txt";
var pathD = path.Normalize(System.Text.NormalizationForm.FormD);

If you look at the value of the two variables, it appears to be the same, to be tested with path == pathD false return.

I went to read more about the method Normalize and from what I saw, it changes something in the binary representation of the string, changing Unicode characters. The visualization is the same, but the comparison (including the File.Exists) mute.

Here works well with File.Exists. For example I made a fiddle: https://dotnetfiddle.net/8PcNcp