Question

I am reading files in various formats and languages and I am currently using a small encoding library to take attempt to detect the proper encoding (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/recipes/DetectEncoding.aspx).

It’s pretty good, but it still misses occasionally. (Multilingual files)

Most of my potential users have very little understanding of encoding (the best I can hope for is ‘it has something to do with characters’) and are very unlikely to be able to choose the right encoding in a list, so I would like to let them cycle through different encodings until the right one is found just by clicking on a button.

Display problems? Click here to try a different encoding! (Well that’s the concept anyway)

What would be the best way to implement something like that?

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Edit: Looks like I didn’t express myself clearly enough. By ‘cycling through the encoding’, I don’t mean ‘how to loop through encodings?’

What I meant was ‘how to let the user try different encodings in sequence without reloading the file?’

The idea is more like this: Let’s say the file is loaded with the wrong encoding. Some strange characters are displayed. The user would click a button ‘Next encoding’ or ‘previous encoding’, and the string would be converted in a different encoding. The user just need to keep clicking until the right encoding is found. (whatever encoding looks good for the user will do fine). As long as the user can click ‘next’, he has a reasonable chance of solving his problem.

What I have found so far involves converting the string to bytes using the current encoding, then converting the bytes to the next encoding, converting those bytes into chars, then converting the char into a string… Doable, but I wonder if there isn’t an easier way to do that.

For instance, if there was a method that would read a string and return it using a different encoding, something like ‘render(string, encoding)’.

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Thanks a lot for the answers!

Answer 1

Read the file as bytes and use then the Encoding.GetString Method.

        byte[] data = System.IO.File.ReadAllBytes(path);          Console.WriteLine(Encoding.UTF8.GetString(data));         Console.WriteLine(Encoding.UTF7.GetString(data));         Console.WriteLine(Encoding.ASCII.GetString(data)); 

So you have to load the file only one time. You can use every encoding based on the original bytes of the file. The user can select the correct one und you can use the result of Encoding.GetEncoding(…).GetString(data) for further processing.