Question

I’ve got a program that in a nutshell reads values from a SQL database and writes them to a tab-delimited text file.

The issue is that some of the values in the database have special characters (TM, dash, ellipsis, etc.) When written to the text file, the formatting is lost and they come across as junk “â„¢ or – etc”

When the value is viewed in the immediate window, before it is written to the txt file, everything looks fine. My guess is that this is an issue of encoding. But, I’m not real sure how to proceed, where to look, or what to look for.

Is this ASCII or UTF-8? If it’s one of those how do I correct it before it’s written to the text file.

Here’s how I build the text file (where feedStr is a StringBuilder)

objReader = New StreamWriter(filePath)
objReader.Write(feedStr)
objReader.Close()

Answer 1

The default encoding for StreamWriter is UTF8 (with no byte order mark). Your result file is ok, the question is what do you open it in afterwards? If you open it in a UTF8 capable text editor, the characters should look the way you want.

You can also write the text file in another encoding, for example iso-8859-1 (latin1)

objReader = New StreamWriter(filePath, false, Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1"))