detect the encoding of an Excel file RSS

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  MyronCope

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  detect the encoding of an Excel file

  Sep 30, 2010 02:42 PM|LINK

  using vb.net/asp.net 2005

  I am opening and reading and I need to detect the encoding of the file that I am reading.  There are different system users who will be using different encoding in their files so I have no control over this.

  
  While the default encoding normally works there are special foreign language (non-English) characters that are not being read correctly, instead there are garbage characters in their place that I see "myString" above.  Good foreign characters are visible in the file but the result in myString are unreadable garbage characters that are not valid.
  

  I have researched this and it has been suggested to determine the encoding of the file and then use that encoding, but I have not been able to find out how to to do this.

  so in a nutshell:  how can I use vb.net to detect the encoding of an excel file?

  
  

  thanks,

  MC
  

  • Edited by MyronCope on Sep 30, 2010 02:53 PM
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  TonyDong

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  Re: detect the encoding of an Excel file

  Sep 30, 2010 04:32 PM|LINK

  Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture

  
   

  Don't forget to click "Mark as Answer" on the post(s) that helped you.
  
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  MyronCope

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  Re: detect the encoding of an Excel file

  Sep 30, 2010 04:52 PM|LINK

  hi, thanks for your feedback.

  I want to determine the encoding for a file, not a thread. I was just researching this and used the following to get what I believe is the BOM (byte order mark) to hopefully determine the encoding of the file,

  Dim enc As Encoding = Encoding.Default
          Dim buffer() As Byte = New Byte(4) {}
          Dim file As New System.IO.FileStream(myFileName, IO.FileMode.Open)
  
  
          file.Read(buffer, 0, 5)
          file.Close()

  
  I ran this and traced the code, I am getting the following from "buffer"" for my test file Character codes that translate into a double quote and then the first 4 characters of the word that is visible in the first (top-most, left-most) cell in the excel document.  I'm assuming that this means that there is no encoding information at the beginning of the file.  Not sure where to go from here.
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  • Edited by MyronCope on Sep 30, 2010 05:30 PM
  • Edited by MyronCope on Sep 30, 2010 05:39 PM
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  MyronCope

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  1656 Points

  1345 Posts

  Re: detect the encoding of an Excel file

  Sep 30, 2010 06:17 PM|LINK

  I got this, the last line of the code below gives me the encoding, I might have to close the streamreader and re-open it with the correct encoding but it does the job, gives me the encoding of the file I just opened:
  

  Dim strEncryptionType As String = String.Empty
          Dim myStreamRdr As System.IO.StreamReader = New System.IO.StreamReader(myFileName, True)
          Dim myString As String = myStreamRdr.ReadToEnd()
          strEncryptionType = mmFileIA.CurrentEncoding.EncodingName

  
  
  

  • Marked as answer by MyronCope on Oct 01, 2010 03:19 PM