VB
An object-oriented programming language developed by Microsoft that is implemented on the .NET Framework. Previously known as Visual Basic .NET.
2,568 questions
VB.NET determine if a file is ASCII text before opening?
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(108.80000000000001, 88%, 20%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3ETL%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
Tony Lewis
1
Reputation point
One can select a file via OpenFileDialog, and set the file filters to .TXT or other extensions to limit input files to text based files. However, it is possible to have an ASCII text file that has no extension, or the wrong extension. Likewise, binary files can have .txt or other file extensions when they are not text based.
Is there a way to check a file when selected and determine if its contents are ASCII text based before (or after) the file contents are read?
VB
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![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(233.6, 28.999999999999996%, 32%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EXZ%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
Xingyu Zhao-MSFT 5,356 Reputation points2021-10-26T06:50:37.623+00:00 Hi @Tony Lewis ,
ASCII is a subset of UTF-8, and it can be identified by the lack of bytes in the 80-FF range.
Here's a reference you can refer to:
Effective way to find any file's Encoding
Hope it could be helpful.
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