Question

I’m not full certain I understand file encoding completely. If I write out text to a file in c#, how can I set the encoding type of that file? Maybe it’s just I do not understand the full spectrum of file encoding.

using (var sw = new StreamWriter(File.Open(@"c:\test.txt", FileMode.CreateNew), Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1")))
{
    sw.WriteLine("my text...");
}

Answer 1

Your code does exactly that – you’re writing out text using ISO Latin 1.

Note that there’s nothing in the file itself to specify the encoding, unless you’re writing out a file which allows you to specify that. The file is basically just a sequence of bytes. The encoding you’re specifying in your code determines how the text you’re writing is converted into bytes, that’s all.