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
- 22nd May, 2007: Initial post
