Asp.net encoding

Question

I have a C#.net console application which reads data from a text file and updates it to the database. The file will have Scandinavian characters and other language characters. This is how I read the file in my app

using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(openFileDialog1.FileName)) 

but this scrabled the output charcters

I tried using utf8 to read the file but it was returning characters similar to chinese.

using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(openFileDialog1.FileName,Encoding.UTF8))

Why is this not working?

Then I tried using the following and its returning the correct characters.

using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(openFileDialog1.FileName,Encoding.GetEncoding(1252)))

My question is will the last method help in converting all the characters from different languages or only scandinavain charcters.

I dont have much idea on encoding if someone can explain me how it works. It would be very helpful.

Answer 1

Here is The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

About 1252 read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1 . This encoding covers most European languages (with latin script), including but limited to Scandinavian.