Encoding Accented Characters

Introduction

There is a problem exporting accented characters in text files. Some programs cannot import or correctly display accented characters. Therefore you need to use encoding to correctly export a plain text file. However, there are a LOT of encodings, so which one should you use?

Here's How

The answer is: iso-8859-8.

That is the Hebrew (ISO-Visual) encoding. The encoding is natively supported in .NET. It intelligently converts to a visual format for you. The other standard encoders do not do this as you will see below.

Example

Converting the following: Frédéric François.

Encoding	Description	Output
ASCII		Fr?d?ric Fran?ois
Default		Frédéric François
UTF7	Unicode (UTF-7)	Fr+AOk-d+AOk-ric Fran+AOc-ois
UTF8	Unicode (UTF-8)	Frédéric François
iso-8859-1	Western European (ISO)	Frédéric François
iso-8859-8	Hebrew (ISO-Visual)	Frederic Francois
us-ascii	US-ASCII	Fr?d?ric Fran?ois
Windows-1252	Western European (Windows)	Frédéric François

Example of Code Using Encoding

StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter
    ("somefile.txt", false, System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-8"));

A Full Example for the Beginner

using (StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter
    ("somefile.txt", false, System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-8")))
{
    DataSet1TableAdapters.binsTA ta = new DataSet1TableAdapters.binsTA();
    DataSet1.binsDataTable dt = ta.GetData();
    foreach (DataSet1.binsRow row in dt.Rows)
    {
        sw.Write(row.ID.ToString());
        sw.Write("|");
        sw.WriteLine(row.description);
    }
}

History

• 22^nd May, 2007: Initial post