How to detect the character encoding of a text file?

Posted by Cédric Boivin on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Cédric Boivin
Published on 2010-12-23T15:40:15Z Indexed on 2010/12/23 15:54 UTC
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I try to detect which character encoding is used in my file.

I try with this code to get the standard encoding

public static Encoding GetFileEncoding(string srcFile)
    {
      // *** Use Default of Encoding.Default (Ansi CodePage)
      Encoding enc = Encoding.Default;

      // *** Detect byte order mark if any - otherwise assume default
      byte[] buffer = new byte[5];
      FileStream file = new FileStream(srcFile, FileMode.Open);
      file.Read(buffer, 0, 5);
      file.Close();

      if (buffer[0] == 0xef && buffer[1] == 0xbb && buffer[2] == 0xbf)
        enc = Encoding.UTF8;
      else if (buffer[0] == 0xfe && buffer[1] == 0xff)
        enc = Encoding.Unicode;
      else if (buffer[0] == 0 && buffer[1] == 0 && buffer[2] == 0xfe && buffer[3] == 0xff)
        enc = Encoding.UTF32;
      else if (buffer[0] == 0x2b && buffer[1] == 0x2f && buffer[2] == 0x76)
        enc = Encoding.UTF7;
      else if (buffer[0] == 0xFE && buffer[1] == 0xFF)      
        // 1201 unicodeFFFE Unicode (Big-Endian)
        enc = Encoding.GetEncoding(1201);      
      else if (buffer[0] == 0xFF && buffer[1] == 0xFE)      
        // 1200 utf-16 Unicode
        enc = Encoding.GetEncoding(1200);


      return enc;
    }

My five first byte are 60, 118, 56, 46 and 49.

Is there a chart that shows which encoding matches those five first bytes?

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