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

I solved my problem of reading portuguese characters, changing the source file on notepad++.

C#

    var url = System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(@"~/Content/data.json");
    string s = string.Empty;
    using (System.IO.StreamReader sr = new System.IO.StreamReader(url, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8,true))
    {
          s = sr.ReadToEnd();
    }

Answer 2

Yes, it could be with the actual encoding of the file, probably unicode. Try UTF-8 as that is the most common form of unicode encoding. Otherwise if the file ASCII then standard ASCII encoding should work.

Answer 3

Try a different encoding such as Encoding.UTF8. You can also try letting StreamReader find the encoding itself:

    StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(inputFilePath, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8, true)

Edit: Just saw your update. Try letting StreamReader do the guessing.

Answer 4

I'm also reading an exported file which contains french and German languages. I used Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1"), true which worked out without any challenges.