I would assume that you already know how to read a text file, e.g. with a StreamReader or with File.ReadAllText or the like. Any time you do anything that involves reading or writing text in files, you can accept the default encoding or you can specify the encoding you want. Check the documentation for any way you care to read text and you'll find an overload that lets you provide an Encoding object. You just have to provide the appropriate one, which you can normally get via a property of the Encoding class.