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 file values are read and shown in the datagrid the characters appear as squares  could there be another problem elsewhere   StreamReader reader   new StreamReader inputFilePath  System Text Encoding ANSI   using  reader   File OpenText inputFilePath     Thanks  Update 1  I have tried all encodings found under System Text Encoding  and all fail to show the file correctly   Update 2  I ve changed the file encoding  resaved the file  to unicode and used System Text Encoding Unicode and it worked just fine  So why did notepad read it correctly  And why didn t System Text Encoding Unicode read the ANSI file

User · Answer

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.

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

for Arabic  I used Encoding GetEncoding 1256   it is working good

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

For swedish          the only solution form the ones above working was   Encoding GetEncoding  iso-8859-1     Hopefully this will save someone time

[c#] C# Help reading foreign characters using StreamReader

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