writing French character in csv files in C#

Question

I have a dbf file which has MONTRÉAL as one of the entires. I have to convert this dbf file into a csv file.

For this I am reading this dbf file using Microsoft Visual FoxPro Driver driver, then converting converting each rows to comma separated, and then writing all lines into a file named "ASD.csv".

But in CSV file MONTRÉAL is displayed as MONTR?AL i.e in place of É a ? character appears. I tried using UTF8 encoding while writing the rows to csv file but even this did not work.

Please help.

Answer 1

you have to use a specific encoding. for french it is "iso-8859-1" or "windows-1252".

Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1")

Answer 2

I suggest you use UTF8 encoding like this:

    using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter("asd.csv", false, Encoding.UTF8))
    {
        writer.WriteLine("Id;City");
        writer.WriteLine("1;Montréal");
        writer.WriteLine("2;Québec");
    }

This will add a BOM (Byte Order Mark) to the beginning of the CSV and you can then open the file with Excel directly, or even with the standard Windows Notepad successfully.