How can I detect the encoding/codepage of a text file

Question

In our application, we receive text files (.txt, .csv, etc.) from diverse sources. When reading, these files sometimes contain garbage, because the

Answer 1

I know it's very late for this question and this solution won't appeal to some (because of its english-centric bias and its lack of statistical/empirical testing), but it's worked very well for me, especially for processing uploaded CSV data:

http://www.architectshack.com/TextFileEncodingDetector.ashx

Advantages:

• BOM detection built-in
• Default/fallback encoding customizable
• pretty reliable (in my experience) for western-european-based files containing some exotic data (eg french names) with a mixture of UTF-8 and Latin-1-style files - basically the bulk of US and western european environments.

Note: I'm the one who wrote this class, so obviously take it with a grain of salt! :)