Encoding Options for File I/O

The Open statement supports Unicode through the use of a new Encoding keyword and variable, and allows you to specify a wide range of encoding options in addition to standard Unicode options.

Usage Example 

Open "C:\MyFile.txt" For Input Encoding utf-8 As #1

Supported Encodings

The full list of encoding options currently defined (and don’t worry, these will come up in Intellisense) is:

  • default_system_ansi
  • utf_7, utf_7_bom
  • utf_8, utf_8_bom
  • utf_16, utf_16_bom
  • us_ascii
  • koi8_u, koi8_r
  • big5
  • iso_8859_1_latin1, iso_8859_2_latin2, iso_8859_3_latin3, iso_8859_4_latin4
  • iso_8859_5_cyrillic, iso_8859_6_arabic, iso_8859_7_greek, iso_8859_8_hebrew
  • iso_8859_9_latin5_turkish, iso_8859_10_latin6_nordic, iso_8859_11_thai
  • iso_8859_13_latin8_baltic, iso_8859_14_latin8_celtic
  • iso_8859_15_latin9_euro, iso_8859_16_latin10_balkan
  • windows_1250_central_europe, windows_1251_cyrillic, windows_1252_western
  • windows_1253_greek, windows_1254_turkish, windows_1255_hebrew, windows_1256_arabic
  • windows_1257_baltic, windows_1258_vietnamese
  • ibm_850_western_europe, ibm_852_central_and_eastern_europe
  • ibm_855_cyrillic, ibm_856_hebrew, ibm_857_turkish, ibm_858_western_europe
  • ibm_860_portuguese, ibm_861_icelandic, ibm_862_hebrew
  • ibm_863_canadian, ibm_865_danish, ibm_866_cyrillic, ibm_869_greek
  • ibm_932_japanese, and ibm_949_korean

Others with a similar format should be accepted depending on system support.