title: Read a file line by line with VB.NET
body: <p>The following code is used to read a file line by line.</p>
  
  <p>It's just a very early version, so all I want to do is display the string in the immediate window. It's working fine, except that characters such as Ä Ü Ö è à and so on are replaced by a black square with a question mark. According to the documentation, the file reader should be compatible with UTF-8 chars so I don't know what is wrong.</p>
  
  <pre><code>...
  
      Dim reader = File.OpenText(filetoimport.Text)
  
      Dim line As String = Nothing
  
      Dim lines As Integer = 0
  
      While (reader.Peek() &lt;&gt; -1)
          line = reader.ReadLine()
          If line.StartsWith("&lt;item key=""") Then
              Dim Firstpart As String = Nothing
  
              Firstpart = line.Substring(11, line.IndexOf(""" value=") - 11)
  
              Debug.WriteLine(Firstpart)
  
              lines = lines + 1
  
              Label3.Text = lines
              Application.DoEvents()
          Else
              Label3.Text = lines
              Application.DoEvents()
          End If
  
      End While
  
  ...
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The file is ANSI-encoded, not UTF-8, but the reader uses UTF-8.</p>