C# Help reading foreign characters using StreamReader

Question

I\'m using the code below to read a text file that contains foreign characters, the file is encoded ANSI and looks fine in notepad. The code below doesn\'t work, when the fi

Answer 1

You may also try the Default encoding, which uses the current system's ANSI codepage.

StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(inputFilePath, Encoding.Default, true)

When you try using the Notepad "Save As" menu with the original file, look at the encoding combo box. It will tell you which encoding notepad guessed is used by the file.

Also, if it is an ANSI file, the detectEncodingFromByteOrderMarks parameter will probably not help much.

Answer 2

I had the same problem and my solution was simple: instead of

Encoding.ASCII

use

Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1")

The answer was found here.

Edit: more solutions. This maybe more accurate one:

Encoding.GetEncoding(1252);

Also, in some cases this will work for you too if your OS default encoding matches file encoding:

Encoding.Default;

Answer 3

Using Encoding.Unicode won't accurately decode an ANSI file in the same way that a JPEG decoder won't understand a GIF file.

I'm surprised that Encoding.Default didn't work for the ANSI file if it really was ANSI - if you ever find out exactly which code page Notepad was using, you could use Encoding.GetEncoding(int).

In general, where possible I'd recommend using UTF-8.

Answer 4

For swedish Å Ä Ö the only solution form the ones above working was:

Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1")

Hopefully this will save someone time.

Answer 5

for Arabic, I used Encoding.GetEncoding(1256). it is working good.

Answer 6

File.OpenText() always uses an UTF-8 StreamReader implicitly. Create your own StreamReader instance instead and specify the desired encoding. like

using (StreamReader reader =  new StreamReader(@"C:\test.txt", Encoding.Default)
 {
 // ...
 }