c#, Excel + csv: how to get the correct encoding?

Question

I\'ve been trying this for quite a while now, but can\'t figure it out. I\'m trying to export data to Excel via a *.csv file. It works great so far, but I have some encodi

Answer 1

I'd suggest you open up the text file in a hex editor, and see what it really is. The BOM for UTF-16 is 0xFEFF, which the writing code is apparently writing to the stream - but the rest of the writing doesn't specify an encoding to use - it would use the default encoding of the StreamWriter, which is UTF-8. There appears to be a mix up of encodings.

When you pop open the file in hex view, if you see lots of 0x00 between the characters, you're working with UTF-16, which is Encoding.Unicode in C#. If there are no 0x00 between chars, the encoding is probably UTF-8.

If the latter case, just fix up the BOM to be EF BB BF rather than FE FF, and read normally with UTF-8 encoding.