'windows-1255' is not a supported encoding name

Question

I'm writing a silverlight 5 application in which I need to read a text file from the user.

Here is a snippet of my code:

  using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(fileStream, Encoding.GetEncoding("windows-1255")))

But I get the exception: "'windows-1255' is not a supported encoding name". Why is that?

And then, how do I read a file in the "windows-1255" encoding? (Hebrew)

Answer 1

There are not many supported encodings in Silverlight. Basically, you get UTF8 and UTF16, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/t9a3kf7c%28VS.95%29.aspx

You can read your file as binary then convert yourself to UTF (8 or 32, I don't know Hebrew). You'll need a table of all the characters (256), then you can loop on your input file and translate directly.

Answer 2

i ran into this problem again,

And after lots and lots of Googleing i found this amazing tool!

http://www.hardcodet.net/2010/03/silverlight-text-encoding-class-generator

this little piece of art that was created by "Philipp Sumi (@phsumi)", takes the name or code page of a well known encoding, and creates a custom Encoding class which compiles under Silverlight.

it does so by reading the existing encoding in wpf, and redactor it to work under silverlight.