Question

How to read an ANSI like notepad.exe?

Asked by: wilfordrocks

If you open file "fails.xml" in notepad.exe you will see it has 4 German characters in a line called "narrative".
When I open the same file in c# using streamreader and textreader, the four characters are converted to little squares.
How can I open this file and see the desired characters?

  • passes.txt
    • 264 bytes

    xml file that cannot be opened by Explorer

  • fails.txt
    • 131 bytes

    xml file that can be opened by Explorer

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Asked On
2009-11-03 at 13:44:55ID24869020
Tags

xml

,

unicode

,

ansi

,

utf-8

,

c#

Topics

Extensible Markup Language (XML)

,

C / C++ / C# Editors and IDEs

Participating Experts
0
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Comments
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Answers

 

by: wilfordrocksPosted on 2009-11-07 at 06:34:06ID: 25766443

Solution:
Read an ANSI file and write it back as UTF-8.  Once in UTF-8 format, the xml parser will accept it.

Open the stream reader using System.Text.Encoding.Default.
As I understand this, it will recognize all characters defined by start->control panel->regional and language->Advanced tab.

StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(@"c:\temp\testfileIn.xml", System.Text.Encoding.Default);
string strXml= reader.ReadToEnd(); //this string will now display correctly in a messagebox or edit window
reader.Close();
----------------------------------------------------
Write back the converted file in the normal way.
using (StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(@"c:\temp\testfileout.xml"))
{
 
   sw.WriteLine(strXml);
}

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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