C# – Converting text file from ANSI to ASCII using C#

asciic++character-encodingencoding

I have an ANSI-encoded file, and I want to convert the lines I read from the file to ASCII.

How do I go about doing this in C#?

EDIT : What if i used "BinaryReader"
BinaryReader reader = new BinaryReader(input, Encoding.Default);
but this reader takes (Stream, Encoding)
but "Stream" is an abstract! And where should I put the path of the file which he will read from ?

Best Solution

A direct conversion from ANSI to ASCII might not always be possible, since ANSI is a superset of ASCII.

You can try converting to UTF-8 using Encoding, though:

Encoding ANSI = Encoding.GetEncoding(1252);

byte[] ansiBytes = ANSI.GetBytes(str);
byte[] utf8Bytes = Encoding.Convert(ANSI, Encoding.UTF8, ansiBytes);

String utf8String = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(utf8Bytes);

Of course you can replace UTF8 with ASCII, but that doesn't really make sense since:

  • if the original string doesn't contain any byte > 126, then it's already ASCII
  • if the original string does contain one or more bytes > 126, then those bytes will be lost

UPDATE:

In response to the updated question, you can use BinaryReader like this:

BinaryReader reader = new BinaryReader(File.Open("foo.txt", FileMode.Open),
                                       Encoding.GetEncoding(1252));
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