C# reading encrypted file returns Black diamonds with ? inside

Question

I have an encrypted file that contains the following chars.

áÒá,èÜÒè

what I see when debugging is Black diamonds containing "?".

I think my open/read file is using the wrong file data type. (unicode, ascii, etc..)

and not correctly reading the data, thus preventing my decryption code from working.

using (var stream = await AuthFile.OpenReadAsync())

                        {

                            using (var reader = new StreamReader(stream))

                            {                                   

                                while ((line = reader.ReadLine()) != null)

                                { ...

if this helps,

the file is created by a VBScript using the following code line.

Set objFileToWrite = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject").OpenTextFile("c:\vbscripts\pid.txt",2,true)

TIA

Tim

Answer 1

I think I found the problem

I think should be using

byte[] readText = File.ReadAllBytes(AuthFile.FullPath);

( now if I can get past the "not access" error)

Tim

Answer 2

Hi @tim , Welcome to Microsoft Q&A,

By default, StreamReader uses UTF-8 encoding, but it seems that your file might have been created with a different encoding (such as ANSI or a different character set). To resolve this, you should explicitly specify the encoding when reading the file.

You can modify your StreamReader to use a specific encoding, such as Encoding.Default (which uses the system's default encoding, often ANSI) or another suitable encoding like Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1") if needed.

When you use byte[] readText = File.ReadAllBytes(AuthFile.FullPath); to read a file, File.ReadAllBytes will directly read the byte data of the file without relying on the encoding.

Best Regards,

Jiale

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