The VB6 native file I/O statements are limited to handling files encoded in "ANSI" using the current locale setting.

Look up the ADO Stream object. It can be loaded from disk and read line by line in text mode. It will handle files in ASCII, UTF-16, UTF-8, whatever. It defaults to "Unicode" (UTF-16).

You could also read such a file using the FSO, but it is limited to ASCII and Unicode (UTF-16).