decode a file stream using UTF-8

Question

I have a XML document, which is very big (about 120M), and I do not want to load it into memory at once. My purpose is to check whether this file is using valid UTF-8 encoding.

Any ideas to have a quick check without reading the whole file into memory in the form of byte[]?

I am using VSTS 2008 and C#.

When using XMLDocument to load an XML document, which contains invalid byte sequences, there is an exception, but when reading all content into a byte array and then checking against UTF-8, there is no exception, any ideas?

Here is a screenshot showing the content of my XML file, or you can download a copy of the file from here

EDIT 1:

class Program
{
    public static byte[] RawReadingTest(string fileName)
    {
        byte[] buff = null;

        try
        {
            FileStream fs = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read);
            BinaryReader br = new BinaryReader(fs);
            long numBytes = new FileInfo(fileName).Length;
            buff = br.ReadBytes((int)numBytes);
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
        }

        return buff;
    }

    static void XMLTest()
    {
        try
        {
            XmlDocument xDoc = new XmlDocument();
            xDoc.Load("c:\\abc.xml");
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
        }
    }

    static void Main()
    {
        try
        {
            XMLTest();
            Encoding ae = Encoding.GetEncoding("utf-8");
            string filename = "c:\\abc.xml";
            ae.GetString(RawReadingTest(filename));
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
        }

        return;
    }
}

EDIT 2: When using new UTF8Encoding(true, true) there will be an exception, but when using new UTF8Encoding(false, true), there is no exception thrown. I am confused, because it should be the 2nd parameter which controls whether an exception is thrown (if there are invalid byte sequences), why the 1st parameter matters?

    public static void TestTextReader2()
    {
        try
        {
            // Create an instance of StreamReader to read from a file.
            // The using statement also closes the StreamReader.
            using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(
                "c:\\a.xml",
                new UTF8Encoding(true, true)
                ))
            {
                int bufferSize = 10 * 1024 * 1024; //could be anything
                char[] buffer = new char[bufferSize];
                // Read from the file until the end of the file is reached.
                int actualsize = sr.Read(buffer, 0, bufferSize);
                while (actualsize > 0)
                {
                    actualsize = sr.Read(buffer, 0, bufferSize);
                }
            }
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            // Let the user know what went wrong.
            Console.WriteLine("The file could not be read:");
            Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
        }

    }

Answer 1

var buffer = new char[32768] ;

using (var stream = new StreamReader (pathToFile, 
    new UTF8Encoding (true, true)))
{
    while (true)
    try
    {
        if (stream.Read (buffer, 0, buffer.Length) == 0)
            return GoodUTF8File ;
    }
    catch (ArgumentException)
    {
        return BadUTF8File ;
    }
}

Answer 2

@George2 I think they mean a solution like the following (which I haven't tested).

Handling the transition between buffers (i.e. caching extra bytes/partial chars between reads) is the responsibillity and an internal implementation detail of the StreamReader implementation.

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Text;

class Test 
{
    public static void Main() 
    {
        try 
        {
            // Create an instance of StreamReader to read from a file.
            // The using statement also closes the StreamReader.
            using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(
                "TestFile.txt",
                Encoding.UTF8
                ))
            {
                const int bufferSize = 1000; //could be anything
                char[] buffer = new char[bufferSize];
                // Read from the file until the end of the file is reached.
                while (bufferSize == sr.Read(buffer, bufferSize, 0)) 
                {
                    //successfuly decoded another buffer's-worth of data
                }
            }
        }
        catch (Exception e) 
        {
            // Let the user know what went wrong.
            Console.WriteLine("The file could not be read:");
            Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
        }
    }
}