Unix detect file encoding

Asked 4 years, 11 months ago. Active 9 months ago. Viewed 74k times. Improve this question. I have already changed the encoding in 1 file. But I have many of these and wanted to make small script that would control all of them and then covert if needed. But I suppose that I can just convert all of them. No harm will be done if some is already in UTF Not a problem no : Just use a wildcard — Rinzwind. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. You can not really automatically find out whether a file was written with encoding X originally.

Just text and numb3rs and simple punctuation Improve this answer. Community Bot 1. ANSI is not really the name of any character encoding. For north american windows developers, ANSI encoding often means the Windows encoding for historical reasons. So you're right I like this answer because it's honest.

I've just wasted too much time trying to sort the encoding on what turned out to be encoded using "Unicode UTF Little Endian ". I never even knew such a thing existed!! A program named file can do this.

Arkadiusz Drabczyk Arkadiusz Drabczyk 1, 9 9 silver badges 16 16 bronze badges. Asked 3 years, 11 months ago. Active 8 months ago. Viewed 22k times. Improve this question. Young Young 1 1 gold badge 4 4 silver badges 9 9 bronze badges. They works. You cannot reliably check encoding, you can only guess.

It is far more likely to be happenstance that your file's current contents are limited to the C0 Controls and Basic Latin characters.

Then you won't need guessing programs. When someone writes a text file, they choose a character encoding. In every case, the reader must use the same encoding to read the file. So, a specification or standard is one way to know which encoding is being used and you should have it available to you. Guessing is very sketchy. You might do so from a sample.

But if a file is part of a repetitive process then the file might have different content in the future that could invalidate the guess. Show 2 more comments. Active Oldest Votes.

This tutorial will show you how to quickly check and convert file encoding charsets on Unix based operational systems, such as Linux distros and Mac OS. Now that you already know the encoding of your file, you can convert your source file to a new one with the desired encoding. Your email address will not be published. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website.

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