"GeorgeAtkins" wrote:

> Help!
>
> I am using vb.net with VS 2003 and dotnet framework 1.1
>
> Problem: I am reading a text file, one line at a time, to extract book
> titles. Many are in Spanish. For some reason I am unaware of, special
> characters are not "read", and automatically dropped!
>
> Original: ¡Adiós, pequeño!
> Reads in vb.net as : Adis, pequeo!
>
> I am doing no pre-processing of the text. Here is a code snippet of my
> project:
>
> Imports System
> Imports System.Globalization
> Imports System.Collections
> Imports System.IO
> Imports System.DateTime
> Imports System.Text.RegularExpressions
> Imports Microsoft.VisualBasic
>
> Sub ReadTitles
> Dim LibCntr, fnd, nf, ctr, y, z, StartPos, TabPos As Integer
> Dim BkTitle As String ' the parsed title from marc file
> Dim arline As String ' AR file
> Dim srAR As System.IO.StreamReader = New
> StreamReader("c:\\ardata.txt")
>
> Do Until srAR.Peek() = -1 ' read AR file until EOF
> ' These 3 lines get the book title from the AR file...
> arline = srAR.ReadLine ' get entire line
> TabPos = InStr(9, arline, vbTab) ' look for embedded tab stop
> ARList.Add(Mid(arline, 9, TabPos - 9)) ' assign title substring
> to arraylist
> Loop
>
> So, an original text line will look like this:
> 30151SP ¡Adiós, pequeño! Janet/Allan Ahlberg 3.4 0.5 47.0
>
> My code is supposed to extract just the title portion: ¡Adiós, pequeño!
> But, as I wrote above, it actually captures this: Adis, pequeo!
>
> What am I missing in all of this? String is unicode-aware, after all. But do
> I need to declare a specific character set or something?
>
> Thanks for any insights!