Issue about 65533 � in C# text file reading

Question

I created a sample app to load all special characters while copy pasting from Openoffice writer to Notepad. Double codes differs and when I try to load this.

Answer 1

U+FFFD is the "Unicode replacement character", which is used if the data you try to read is invalid for the encoding which is being used to convert binary data to text.

For example, if you write a file out using ISO-8859-1, but then try to read it using UTF-8, then you could easily end up with some byte sequences which simply aren't valid UTF-8. Each invalid byte would be translated (by default) into U+FFFD.

Basically, you need to provide the right encoding to File.ReadAllLines, as a second argument. That means you need to know the encoding of the file first, of course.