Unicode and ASCII may not be encoding correctly

Question

Hi, I am using visual studio 2022 to host a .NET 8 MVC web application project. I am trying to read a text file and write it to another text file.

   This is the code I am using:

string wdata = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(file);          

 // This is the statement that determines the encode
 // result in the output text file

 System.IO.``File.WriteAllText(wfile, wdata, System.Text.Encoding.Unicode);

  The problem is that the text file I am reading from has ”hyphens”. But when I read it, and write it to the other text file, the ”hyphens” turn into:

This is the “hyphen” in the original text I am trying to read.

This is when written using the encoding ASCII

This happens when written with encoding UTF8

Thanks for any advice or suggestions

Answer 1

Hi @iqworks Information Quality Works

Try reading the file using Encoding.UTF8 explicitly to ensure that special characters are preserved：

string wdata = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(file, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8); System.IO.File.WriteAllText(wfile, wdata, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8);

I would recommend loading the file into a text editor like Notepad++ that tells you what the encoding of the file is (in the status bar). If it's not encoded in UTF-8 to start with, reading and writing as UTF-8 won't work.

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Best regards,

Rena

Answer 2

I don't think that your "hyphen" in the text file belongs to ASCII.

Please open the text file using binary editor available in Visual Studio 2022.

If your "hyphen" really belongs to ASCII it will be shown as "2D":