Question

I have a text file saved as UTF-8 and when I try to read the file it gives me weird characters and not the correct characters (it contains Chinese characters). How can I make it give me the correct Chinese characters?

Option Explicit

Dim objFSO, strTextFile, strData, strLine, arrLines, aniTextFile, aniData, aniLines, aniLine, objTextFile, fso, inputFileList, listFile, fname
Dim iim1, iret, iret2, iret3, i
Const ForReading   = 1

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
strTextFile = "C:\Users\admin\Desktop\ArtistCG\folder.txt"
strData = objFSO.OpenTextFile(strTextFile,ForReading).ReadAll
arrLines = Split(strData,vbCrLf)

aniTextFile = "C:\Users\admin\Desktop\ArtistCG\folder-list.txt"
aniData = objFSO.OpenTextFile(aniTextFile,ForReading).ReadAll
aniLines = Split(aniData,vbCrLf)

For i = 0 To UBound(arrLines)
  strData = objFSO.OpenTextFile(arrLines(i),ForReading).ReadAll
  WScript.Echo strData

  Set listFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(aniLines(i),ForReading)
  Do While Not listFile.AtEndOfStream
    fName = listFile.ReadLine
    WScript.Echo fName
  Loop
  listFile.Close
Next 

Answer 1

From the documentation:

The FSO can read only ASCII text files. You cannot use the FSO to read
Unicode files or to read binary file formats such as Microsoft Word or
Microsoft Excel.

Since you got weird characters, I guess that’s somewhat incorrect and the file was read in some 8-bit windows code page because if it really could read only ASCII, you would have seen ????

Anyway, if you can use ADO, you can do this:

Dim objStream, strData

Set objStream = CreateObject("ADODB.Stream")

objStream.CharSet = "utf-8"
objStream.Open
objStream.LoadFromFile("C:\Users\admin\Desktop\ArtistCG\folder.txt")

strData = objStream.ReadText()

objStream.Close
Set objStream = Nothing