Why when I read a german .txt file with a streamreader the german letters get lost?

Question

3.00/5 (2 votes)

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Maybe making the string Unicode.

Similar problem with a Google Translator program I found here on CodeProject...

What I have tried:

using (StreamReader SR = new StreamReader(@"C:\Users\john\Dropbox\germanWords.txt"))
            {
                while (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(s=SR.ReadLine()))
                {
                    try
                    {
                        l.Add(new ListOfWordsApp.FormMain.wordAndMeaning(
                            s.Substring(0, s.IndexOf("-")),
                           s.Substring(s.IndexOf("-") + 1)));
                    }
                    catch
                    {
                        MessageBox.Show(s);
                    }
                }
            }

Posted 25-Feb-17 6:20am

john1990_1

Updated 25-Feb-17 7:46am

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Philippe Mori 25-Feb-17 13:35pm

Most probable reason is that you must specify which encoding is used for your file.

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OriginalGriff · Accepted Answer · 2017-02-25T07:46:00

When you create a StreamReader using the simplest constructor - providing only the filepath - it is opened by default assuming UTF8 encoding-if your text file is not encoded in UTF8 then it's unlikely that any "non-English" characters such as those with an umlaut will be picked up correctly. You can specify the encoding: StreamReader Constructor (Stream, Encoding) (System.IO)[^] but I'd start by having a good look at your input data and it's source before I went too far to makesure that the characters you arelooking for aren't already "corrupted".