ASCII files

[Alex Leduc]

I'm trying to load ASCII files that contain characters from the French
language in a way that is independant of whatever Locale the machine is
configured to use.

So If I have machine who's default Locale is "en-US" and I open some
french text like this:

[C# exaple that has the same behaviour in any .net languages]

StreamReader sr = new StreamReader("C :\\someFrenchFi le.txt");
string strInput = sr.ReadToEnd();

Suppose the file contains this:
"Le Québec en été."
the characters that I get in strInput are:
"Le Qu?bec en ?t?."

If I change the default Locale in the Control Panel and use
Encoding.Defaul t in the StreamReader's constructor parameters, I get the
right characters in strInput:
"Le Québec en été."

What I'd like to be able to do is load the french string with the right
characters regardless of what's the machine's default Locale. What's the
way to programmaticall y decide what Locale to use with all ASCII strings?

Alexandre Leduc

[Alex Leduc]

Thanks a lot. That worked fine.

Now what I'd like to know is if there's a way to tell my application to
always use this encoding for whatever string related methods/types it
has to use.

Kind of like in C

char *loc = setlocale(LC_AL L, "French_Canada. 1252");

which can set the appication's locale at a global scope.

Alexandre Leduc

[Alex Leduc]

Thanks for the link. I really needed to read somthing like this.

Alexandre Leduc

[Marc Scheuner [MVP ADSI]]

>Yeah I think what I was talking about is ANSI. I never understood the

difference between the two so I assumed they were two different names
for the same thing.

No, not really - the ASCII stuff is "old" DOS age thingies - the ASCII
character set is standardized up to ASCII 127 and country-specific
above that - it usually contains things like French accented
characters, German Umlauts (ö ä ü) and so forth, plus line drawing
characters and a few mathematical symbols.

ANSI is the Windows base character set, which tossed out the
line-drawing characters and math stuff, and added extra characters.

Marc
=============== =============== =============== =============== ====
Marc Scheuner May The Source Be With You!
Bern, Switzerland m.scheuner(at)i nova.ch

[Marc Scheuner [MVP ADSI]]

>Alex Leduc <le******@netsc ape.net> wrote:

I'm trying to load ASCII files that contain characters from the French
language

Assuming you mean accented characters, that's impossible. ASCII doesn't
contain any accented characters.

8-bit ASCII (e.g. codepage 850) does contain accented chars and German
umlauts etc - ASCII doesn't always stop at 7 bit, you know! There's a
whole wide world outside of English-speaking 7 bits! :-)

Marc
=============== =============== =============== =============== ====
Marc Scheuner May The Source Be With You!
Bern, Switzerland m.scheuner(at)i nova.ch

[Joerg Jooss]

Jon Skeet schrieb:

Alex Leduc <le******@netsc ape.net> wrote:

I'm trying to load ASCII files that contain characters from the
French language

Assuming you mean accented characters, that's impossible. ASCII
doesn't contain any accented characters.

See http://www.pobox.com/~skeet/csharp/unicode.html

In addition to reading Jon's excellent article, I recommend to have a
look at

http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/r...ce/cphome.mspx

to understand the subtle differences between not-quite-the-same
encodings like ISO-8859-1(5) and CP-1252.

Cheers,
--
Joerg Jooss
jo*********@gmx .net