How to read text files with ANSI encoding and non-English letters?

You get the question-mark-diamond characters when your textfile uses high-ANSI encoding -- meaning it uses characters between 127 and 255. Those characters have the eighth (i.e. the most significant) bit set. When ASP.NET reads the textfile it assumes UTF-8 encoding, and that most significant bit has a special meaning.

You must force ASP.NET to interpret the textfile as high-ANSI encoding, by telling it the codepage is 1252:

String textFilePhysicalPath = System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/textfiles/MyInputFile.txt"); String contents = File.ReadAllText(textFilePhysicalPath, System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(1252)); lblContents.Text = contents.Replace("\n", "<br />"); // change linebreaks to HTML 

If I remember correctly the XmlDocument.Load(string) method always assumes UTF-8, regardless of the XML encoding. You would have to create a StreamReader with the correct encoding and use that as the parameter.

xmlDoc.Load(new StreamReader( File.Open("file.xml"), Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-15"))); 

I just stumbled across KB308061 from Microsoft. There's an interesting passage: Specify the encoding declaration in the XML declaration section of the XML document. For example, the following declaration indicates that the document is in UTF-16 Unicode encoding format:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?> 

Note that this declaration only specifies the encoding format of an XML document and does not modify or control the actual encoding format of the data.

Link Source:

XmlDocument.Load() method fails to decode € (euro)

In my case of c++/clr (WinForms) such approach had a success:

String^ str2 = File::ReadAllText("MyText_cyrillic.txt",System::Text::Encoding::GetEncoding(1251)); textBox1->Text = str2; 

using (StreamReader file = new StreamReader(filePath, Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1"))) { JsonSerializer serializer = new JsonSerializer(); IList<Type> result= (IList<Type>)serializer.Deserialize(file, typeof(IList<Type>)); } 

ANSI Code : ISO-8859-1

using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(File.Open(@"E:\Sample.txt", FileMode.Append), Encoding.GetEncoding(1250))) ////File.Create(path) { writer.Write("Sample Text"); }