Garbage value while reading HTML body using C#

Question

I have below HTML file which contains content like below:

<HTML>
<BODY>
...
........ company's Chief Financial Officer.   Now the.......
...
</BODY>
</HTML>

I am reading the content of this file using:

StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(filePath))
{
   String line = sr.ReadToEnd();
   stringBuilder.Append(line);
}
strFileContent = stringBuilder.ToString();

However it is returning string as:

........ company�s Chief Financial Officer.��Now the.......

HTML files are in my local system.

What is the encoding of the file? Try specifying the encoding explicitly, otherwise `StreamReader` will default to `UTF8`. — Sriram Sakthivel, Oct 29 '14 at 06:43
@ Sriram, present encoding is charset=windows-1252. I think this is creating issue — Aquarius24, Oct 29 '14 at 06:50

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 29 '14 at 06:58

You need to use the same encoding which was used to create the file. StreamReader assumes your encoding is UTF8 by default and tries to decode the file using that, but your original encoding is windows-1252(as you said in comments). Trying to read with wrong encoding produces junk data for obvious reasons.

You should explicitly say what encoding the file is in. Here's how you do it.

var encoding = Encoding.GetEncoding(1252);//windows-1252
using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(filePath, encoding))
...

Bonus reading

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 29 '14 at 06:55

0

you must set Encoding in StreamReader like this:

using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(filePath, Encoding.UTF8))

answered Oct 29 '14 at 06:55

Asieh hojatoleslami

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Garbage value while reading HTML body using C#

2 Answers2