StreamReader.CurrentEncoding Property

Definition

Gets the current character encoding that the current StreamReader object is using.

public virtual System.Text.Encoding CurrentEncoding { get; }

Property Value

The current character encoding used by the current reader. The value can be different after the first call to any Read method of StreamReader, since encoding autodetection is not done until the first call to a Read method.

Examples

The following code example gets the encoding of the specified StreamReader object.

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Text;

class Test
{
    
    public static void Main()
    {
        string path = @"c:\temp\MyTest.txt";

        try
        {
            if (File.Exists(path))
            {
                File.Delete(path);
            }

            //Use an encoding other than the default (UTF8).
            using (StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(path, false, new UnicodeEncoding()))
            {
                sw.WriteLine("This");
                sw.WriteLine("is some text");
                sw.WriteLine("to test");
                sw.WriteLine("Reading");
            }

            using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(path, true))
            {
                while (sr.Peek() >= 0)
                {
                    Console.Write((char)sr.Read());
                }

                //Test for the encoding after reading, or at least
                //after the first read.
                Console.WriteLine("The encoding used was {0}.", sr.CurrentEncoding);
                Console.WriteLine();
            }
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("The process failed: {0}", e.ToString());
        }
    }
}

Remarks

For a list of common I/O tasks, see Common I/O Tasks.

Applies to

Product Versions
.NET Core 1.0, Core 1.1, Core 2.0, Core 2.1, Core 2.2, Core 3.0, Core 3.1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
.NET Framework 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4.5, 4.5.1, 4.5.2, 4.6, 4.6.1, 4.6.2, 4.7, 4.7.1, 4.7.2, 4.8, 4.8.1
.NET Standard 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1
UWP 10.0

See also