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

If someone is looking for a 93.9% solution. This works for me:

public static class StreamExtension
{
    /// 

    /// Convert the content to a string.
    /// 
    /// The stream.
    /// 
    public static string ReadAsString(this Stream stream)
    {
        var startPosition = stream.Position;
        try
        {
            // 1. Check for a BOM
            // 2. or try with UTF-8. The most (86.3%) used encoding. Visit: http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/character_encoding/all/
            var streamReader = new StreamReader(stream, new UTF8Encoding(encoderShouldEmitUTF8Identifier: false, throwOnInvalidBytes: true), detectEncodingFromByteOrderMarks: true);
            return streamReader.ReadToEnd();
        }
        catch (DecoderFallbackException ex)
        {
            stream.Position = startPosition;

            // 3. The second most (6.7%) used encoding is ISO-8859-1. So use Windows-1252 (0.9%, also know as ANSI), which is a superset of ISO-8859-1.
            var streamReader = new StreamReader(stream, Encoding.GetEncoding(1252));
            return streamReader.ReadToEnd();
        }
    }
}