How to judge the encoding of a txt file

Question

Possible duplicate:
How to determine the encoding / encoding of a text file

I am developing a winform system. And you need to read the txt file.

Unfortunately, there are many txt-encoded files. I cannot read this using a specific encoding.

The problem is how to judge the encoding of the txt file.

Answer 1

In speeches by @Gens and @Samuel Neff, I solve the problem. Here is my code.

public static Encoding GetFileEncoding(string srcFile) { // *** Use Default of Encoding.Default (Ansi CodePage) Encoding encoding = Encoding.Default; using (FileStream stream = File.OpenRead(fileName)) { // *** Detect byte order mark if any - otherwise assume default byte[] buff = new byte[5]; stream.Read(buff, 0, buff.Length); if (buff[0] == 0xEF && buff[1] == 0xBB && buff[2] == 0xBF) { encoding = Encoding.UTF8; } else if (buff[0] == 0xFE && buff[1] == 0xFF) { encoding = Encoding.BigEndianUnicode; } else if (buff[0] == 0xFF && buff[1] == 0xFE) { encoding = Encoding.Unicode; } else if (buff[0] == 0 && buff[1] == 0 && buff[2] == 0xFE && buff[3] == 0xFF) { encoding = Encoding.UTF32; } else if (buff[0] == 0x2B && buff[1] == 0x2F && buff[2] == 0x76) { encoding = Encoding.UTF7; } } return encoding; } 

Answer 2

See this answer here:

How to determine the encoding / codepage of a text file

You cannot find the code page, you need to say so. You can analyze bytes and guess them, but this can give some strange (sometimes funny) results. I can’t find it now, but I’m sure that Notepad can be fooled by displaying English text in Chinese.

and the article that she refers to:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/Unicode.html

The most important fact about coding

If you completely forget everything that I just explained, remember one extremely important fact. It doesn't make sense to have a string without knowing which encoding it uses. You can no longer stick your head in the sand and pretend that the “plain” text is ASCII. There is no such thing as plain text.

If you have a string in memory, in a file, or in an email message, you need to know what encoding it is in, or you cannot interpret or display it correctly.