Question

Environment: Visual Studio 2008 SP1

I have the following line in my text file:

using (var reader = File.OpenText(@"c:\temp\DATA.txt"))
{
  ...
  string textLine = "ist where [name]='Curaçao')"
}

Please notice the non-English character.

Whenever the reader.ReadLine gets to this point it turns it into a question mark in my console application.

Any ideas how to preserve that?

Answer 1

This is most likely an encoding issue – the reader is using a different encoding to the one the file is in.

Make sure both are using the same encoding.

File.OpenText will use the UTF8Encoding – if your file is in a different encoding, this may very well be the issue.

To specify an encoding, construct StreamReader with a constructor that takes an Encoding parameter:

using (var reader = new StreamReader(@"c:\temp\DATA.txt", 
                                               Encoding.GetEncoding(860)))
{
  ...
  string textLine = "ist where [name]='Curaçao')"
}

In the above example, I am using the Portuguese encoding.