Question

In the Open with menu of a .cs file there’s Csharp editor and Csharp editor with encoding. I opened a solution with both and didn’t see a difference.

What’s the difference between them?

Answer 1

Unless your .cs file includes characters outside of the normal ASCII range, you won’t see a difference in the actual contents of the file. The difference is whether or not the editor tries to detect the character encoding you saved your file with when you open it again, or asks you specifically.

By default, when you save a new .cs file, VS uses the current ANSI code page to encode the characters. (You can switch this to use UTF-8 by default with the appropriate options.) However, you can instead chose to “Save with Encoding…”, which will prompt you for the specific character encoding you want to save it.

Internally, your code is being handled as UTF-16, since that’s what Windows deals with as it’s native string format. On-disk, however, UTF-16 would most likely blow up your source files to double their size, since most of the C# code you write probably fits into a single byte. So, when writing to disk, VS writes out your data in a particular code page that defines how to convert the UTF-16 characters into some other, possibly 8-bit character set.

When you reload a file in VS, it attempts to figure out what encoding that file was in, and if it can’t, it will fall back on the current ANSI code page. (You can force it to fall back to UTF-8 via some options, but it won’t ever fall back to a different encoding.)

When you reload a file “With Encoding”, you get the same prompt as when you saved the file, asking you which encoding was used. This way, if Studio gets it wrong, you can fix it.

Unless you do a lot of internationalized programming, where you have foreign-language strings embedded in your .cs file from a language other than the default, you probably don’t need to use the explicit “with encoding” save or loads. But, they are there if you need them.