Why is the XmlWriter always outputting utf-16 encoding?

Question

I have this extension method

    public static string SerializeObject<T>(this T value)
    {
        var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));           
        var settings = new XmlWriterSettings
                       {
                        Encoding = new UTF8Encoding(true), 
                        Indent = false, 
                        OmitXmlDeclaration = false,
                        NewLineHandling = NewLineHandling.None
                       };

        using(var stringWriter = new StringWriter()) 
        {
            using(var xmlWriter = XmlWriter.Create(stringWriter, settings)) 
            {
                serializer.Serialize(xmlWriter, value);
            }

            return stringWriter.ToString();
        }
    }

but whenever I call this it has an encoding of utf-16 specified, ie <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Strings are UTF-16, so writing to a StringWriter will always use UTF-16. If that's not what you want, then use some other TextWriter derived class, with the encoding you like.