how to read special character like é, â and others in C#

Question

I can't read those special characters I tried like this

1st way #

string xmlFile = File.ReadAllText(fileName);

2nd way #

FileStream fs = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read);
StreamReader r = new StreamReader(fs);
string s = r.ReadToEnd();

But both statements don't understand those special characters. How should I read?

UPDATE ###

I also try all encoding with

string xmlFile = File.ReadAllText(fileName, Encoding. );

but still don't understand those special characters.

how do you know your program isn't accepting those characters? what are you doing with them? if you're spitting them back out to the console it could be that your terminal isn't displaying them correctly, but you're reading them just fine. — mpen, Nov 11 '11 at 03:38
What is not read correctly? Show a line of sample text with data that is read wrong, the result you observe, the result you expect, and how you made the observation. — Joel Coehoorn, Nov 11 '11 at 03:39

score 112 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 11 '11 at 03:38

112

There is no such thing as "special character". What those likely are is extended ascii characters from the latin1 set (iso-8859-1). You can read those by supplying encoding explicitly to the stream reader (otherwise it will assume UTF8)

using (StreamReader r = new StreamReader(fileName, Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1")))
    r.ReadToEnd();

answered Nov 11 '11 at 03:38

Ilia G

10,043
2
40
59

6

string[] lines = File.ReadAllLines(fileName,System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1")); also works perfect – Muhammad Rehan Qadri Jan 21 '16 at 04:08
This solves my problem, but I do not understand why. In my case my streamreader replaced 'ë' with '�' when going through a json file (when parsing with UTF-8). Why though, UTF-8 surely knowns the character 'ë', and json does not have an encoding I know of? Or does this have to do with .NET runtime or something? – Daniël Camps Mar 15 '19 at 13:49
1

After applying this, my problem solved for multiplication and plus sign, but apostrophe + S ('s) is not display properly, it replaced with square this sign. how to fix this? – Brijesh Jun 19 '19 at 07:00

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 11 '11 at 03:39

7

StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(stream, Encoding.UTF8)

answered Nov 11 '11 at 03:39

Kakashi

2,165
14
19

1

StreamReader uses UTF8 by default. – Ilia G Nov 11 '11 at 03:43
yeah, I know that. but I tried read an file text containing accents and etc and the returns it something like: ?? instead of 'á' for example. I setting the coding to utf8(as suggested here) and this worked fine. – Kakashi Nov 11 '11 at 03:53
1

hmm I am not sure... I would have to look at the code and actual file to see what was going on there. But but according to this http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f2ke0fzy.aspx StreamREader init with UTF8 encoding by default and that has been the case as far as I tried. – Ilia G Nov 11 '11 at 04:02

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 14 '20 at 08:13

4

This worked for me :

var json = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(@"././response/response.json" , System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1"));

answered Apr 14 '20 at 08:13

Jaydeep Shil

1,894
22
21

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 11 '11 at 03:36

3

You have to tell the StreamReader that you are reading Unicode like so

StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(stream, Encoding.Unicode);

If your file is of some other encoding, specify it as the second parameter

answered Nov 11 '11 at 03:36

parapura rajkumar

24,045
1
55
85

1

For some reason I got Chinese characters with this (I needed extended latin). – Ivana Bakija Aug 27 '20 at 09:35

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 14 '21 at 18:23

I had to "find" the encoding of the file first

//try to "find" the encoding, if not found, use UTF8
var enc = GetEncoding(filePath)??Encoding.UTF8;
var text = File.ReadAllText(filePath, enc );

(please refer to this answer to get the GetEncoding function)

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Dec 02 '21 at 14:29

If you can modify the file in question, you can save it with encoding.

I had a json file that I had created (normally) in VS, and I was having the same problem. Rather than specify the encoding when reading the file (I was using System.IO.File.ReadAllText which defaults to UTF8), I resaved the file (File->Save As) and on the Save button, I clicked the arrow and chose "Save with Encoding", then chose "Unicode (UTF-8 with signature) - Codepage 65001".

Problem solved, no need to specify the encoding when reading the file.

how to read special character like é, â and others in C#

6 Answers6

Linked