Determine a string's encoding in C#

Question

Is there any way to determine a string\'s encoding in C#?

Say, I have a filename string, but I don\'t know if it is encoded in Unicode UTF-16 or the

Answer 1

I know this is a bit late - but to be clear:

A string doesn't really have encoding... in .NET the a string is a collection of char objects. Essentially, if it is a string, it has already been decoded.

However if you are reading the contents of a file, which is made of bytes, and wish to convert that to a string, then the file's encoding must be used.

.NET includes encoding and decoding classes for: ASCII, UTF7, UTF8, UTF32 and more.

Most of these encodings contain certain byte-order marks that can be used to distinguish which encoding type was used.

The .NET class System.IO.StreamReader is able to determine the encoding used within a stream, by reading those byte-order marks;

Here is an example:

    /// 

    /// return the detected encoding and the contents of the file.
    /// 
    /// 
    /// 
    /// 
    public static Encoding DetectEncoding(String fileName, out String contents)
    {
        // open the file with the stream-reader:
        using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(fileName, true))
        {
            // read the contents of the file into a string
            contents = reader.ReadToEnd();

            // return the encoding.
            return reader.CurrentEncoding;
        }
    }