Utf8 encoding problem reading DBF File

Question

4.00/5 (1 vote)

See more:

Hi, I want to read a German dbf file. It contains umlauts which are not available in ASCII encoding. I tried to replace the "Encoding.ASCII" with "Encoding.UTF8", but without success. The ByteReader is in UTF8 mode too. I used this great snippet
Load a DBF into a DataTable[^]

Can someone help me please? :D

BTW Sorry for my bad English.

Posted 9-Aug-12 4:12am

plex88

Updated 9-Aug-12 4:50am

Nueman

v3

Add a Solution

Comments

Nueman 9-Aug-12 10:53am

Assisted OP with English.

2 solutions

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

**Zoltán Zörgő** · Answer 1 · 2012-08-11T06:14:00

DBF is not supporting UTF8. You probably have a code page applied (1252 I suppose), than what people call ASCII on PC-s is only one of the code pages (437). You can use Encoding.Convert[^] method to convert the data to utf8.

Something like this:

C#

Encoding wind1252 = Encoding.GetEncoding(1252);
Encoding utf8 = Encoding.UTF8;
byte[] wind1252Bytes = ...; //what you have read from the dbf field
byte[] utf8Bytes = Encoding.Convert(wind1252, utf8, wind1252Bytes);
string utf8String = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(utf8Bytes);

(source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5568033/convert-a-strings-character-encoding-from-windows-1252-to-utf-8[^])

Erik Rude · Answer 2 · 2012-08-11T04:31:00

Solution 1

When I had problems with ASCII encoding it helped me reading this Joel On Software article[^]
I can't promise it will help you, but it may.

Posted 11-Aug-12 4:31am

Erik Rude