Read utf-8 text file in vbscript

Question

I have a text file saved as UTF-8 and when I try to read the file it gives me weird characters and not the correct characters (it contains Chinese characters). How can I make it give me the correct Chinese characters?

Option Explicit  Dim objFSO, strTextFile, strData, strLine, arrLines, aniTextFile, aniData, aniLines, aniLine, objTextFile, fso, inputFileList, listFile, fname Dim iim1, iret, iret2, iret3, i Const ForReading   = 1  Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") strTextFile = "C:\Users\admin\Desktop\ArtistCG\folder.txt" strData = objFSO.OpenTextFile(strTextFile,ForReading).ReadAll arrLines = Split(strData,vbCrLf)  aniTextFile = "C:\Users\admin\Desktop\ArtistCG\folder-list.txt" aniData = objFSO.OpenTextFile(aniTextFile,ForReading).ReadAll aniLines = Split(aniData,vbCrLf)  For i = 0 To UBound(arrLines)   strData = objFSO.OpenTextFile(arrLines(i),ForReading).ReadAll   WScript.Echo strData    Set listFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(aniLines(i),ForReading)   Do While Not listFile.AtEndOfStream     fName = listFile.ReadLine     WScript.Echo fName   Loop   listFile.Close Next  

Answer 1

From the documentation:

The FSO can read only ASCII text files. You cannot use the FSO to read Unicode files or to read binary file formats such as Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel.

Since you got weird characters, I guess that's somewhat incorrect and the file was read in some 8-bit windows code page because if it really could read only ASCII, you would have seen ????

Anyway, if you can use ADO, you can do this:

Dim objStream, strData  Set objStream = CreateObject("ADODB.Stream")  objStream.CharSet = "utf-8" objStream.Open objStream.LoadFromFile("C:\Users\admin\Desktop\ArtistCG\folder.txt")  strData = objStream.ReadText()  objStream.Close Set objStream = Nothing