What is the character encoding?

Question

I have several characters that aren't recognized properly. Characters like:

º
á
ó
(etc..)

This means that the characters encoding is not utf-8 right? So, can you tell me what character encoding could it be please.

Answer 1

read this first http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

There are two encodings: the one that was used to encode string and one that is used to decode string. They must be the same to get expected result. If they are different then some characters will be displayed incorrectly. we can try to guess if you post actual and expected results.

Answer 2

We don't have nearly enough information to really answer this, but the gist of it is: you shouldn't just guess. You need to work out where the data is coming from, and find out what the encoding is. You haven't told us anything about the data source, so we're completely in the dark. You might want to try Encoding.Default if these are files saved with something like Notepad.

If you know what the characters are meant to be and how they're represented in binary, that should suggest an encoding... but again, we'd need to know more information.

Answer 3

I wrote a couple of methods to narrow down the possibilities a while back for situations just like this.

 static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Encoding[] matches = FindEncodingTable('Ÿ');
            Encoding[] enc2 = FindEncodingTable(159, 'Ÿ');
        }
        // Locates all Encodings with the specified Character and position
        // "CharacterPosition":  Decimal position of the character on the unknown encoding table.  E.G. 159 on the extended ASCII table
       //"character":  The character to locate in the encoding table.  E.G.  'Ÿ' on the extended ASCII table
         static Encoding[] FindEncodingTable(int CharacterPosition, char character)
        {
            List matches = new List();
            byte myByte = (byte)CharacterPosition;
            byte[] bytes = { myByte };
            foreach (EncodingInfo encInfo in Encoding.GetEncodings())
            {
                Encoding thisEnc = Encoding.GetEncoding(encInfo.CodePage);
                char[] chars = thisEnc.GetChars(bytes);
                if (chars[0] == character)
                {
                    matches.Add(thisEnc);
                    break;
                }
            }
            return matches.ToArray();
        }
        // Locates all Encodings that contain the specified character
        static Encoding[] FindEncodingTable(char character)
        {
            List matches = new List();
            foreach (EncodingInfo encInfo in Encoding.GetEncodings())
            {
                Encoding thisEnc = Encoding.GetEncoding(encInfo.CodePage);
                char[] chars = { character };
                byte[] temp = thisEnc.GetBytes(chars);
                if (temp != null)
                    matches.Add(thisEnc);
            }
            return matches.ToArray();
        }