Problem writing an UTF-8 file

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
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Guest

Hi all...

I need to create a CSV file from an application. That file has latin
characters such as á, í, ñ and so on. The separator character of the CSV is a
semi-colon (;)

When I create the file using:
StreamWriter f = new StreamWriter(file_name, false, Encoding.UTF8);

and when the file is closed I see that latin characters ara bad encoded
(they looks bad with strange symbols). When this happens I can open the CSV
file directly in Excel what recognizes the separator character.

In order to make latin characters be well encoded, I created the file using
Encoding.Unicode. This way, the file shows data with the right encoding and
latin characters look well. In this case, if I open the file in Excel, it
doesn't recognize the separator character, so all data is placed in the first
column. To solve it partially, I have to save the file with TXT extension,
and then to use the Excel wizard to open the file.

How can I create a file where the encoding include until extended ASCII
(8-bit per character)?

Thanks
Jaime
 
Jaime Stuardo said:
I need to create a CSV file from an application. That file has latin
characters such as ?, ?, ? and so on. The separator character of the CSV is a
semi-colon (;)

When I create the file using:
StreamWriter f = new StreamWriter(file_name, false, Encoding.UTF8);

and when the file is closed I see that latin characters ara bad encoded
(they looks bad with strange symbols).
Click to expand...

How are you looking at the file? If you're using something which
doesn't understand UTF-8, you would indeed see rubbish.
When this happens I can open the CSV
file directly in Excel what recognizes the separator character.

In order to make latin characters be well encoded, I created the file using
Encoding.Unicode. This way, the file shows data with the right encoding and
latin characters look well. In this case, if I open the file in Excel, it
doesn't recognize the separator character, so all data is placed in the first
column. To solve it partially, I have to save the file with TXT extension,
and then to use the Excel wizard to open the file.

How can I create a file where the encoding include until extended ASCII
(8-bit per character)?
Click to expand...

Well, there's no single "extended ASCII" encoding, and UTF-8 isn't what
you're thinking of anyway. You could try using Encoding.Default, but
that's not a terribly pleasant solution. I don't know whether Excel
supports Unicode/UTF-8 CSV files - you might want to ask in an Excel
newsgroup. Once you know which encoding you want to use, the .NET side
is easy.

See http://www.pobox.com/~skeet/csharp/unicode.html and
http://www.pobox.com/~skeet/csharp/debuggingunicode.html for more
information.
 
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