Invalid characters in File.ReadAllText

Question

I\'m calling File.ReadAllText() in a program designed to format some files that I have.

Some of these files contain the ® (174) symbol. H

Answer 1

The character you are reading is the Replacement character

used to replace an incoming character whose value is unknown or unrepresentable in Unicode compare the use of U+001A as a control character to indicate the substitute function

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/fffd/index.htm

You are getting this because the actual encoding of the file does not match the encoding your program expects.

By default ReadAllText expects UTF-8. It is encountering a byte sequence that does not represent a valid UTF-8 character, so replacing it with the Replacement character.