I accidentally saved a file written in Greek as ANSI instead of Unicode. I had so much stuff written there, notes for my upcoming college exams and I really really need them. Now everything is ''???''
Is there a way to retrieve the file?
The data has been lost. Characters that your system's ANSI charset does not support were converted to ?, and you can't undo that. There is no recovering characters that were converted to ?.
Notepad should have warned you about the data loss before it allowed the file to be saved.
Related
I am integrating data using some flat files. I'm getting the flat files delivered by FTP as .csv-files out of MS SQL exports from a business partner.
I asked him to encode it as UTF-8 (just using the standard I thought).
Now I can see in his files that a lot of UTF-8 bytes such as "& # 2 3 3 ;" (w/o the spaces) can be seen as plain text when I open it in Notedpad++ (or also using my "ETL" tool).
Before I ask him to fix it into proper UTF-8, I would like to understand the issue and whether my claim is actually correct?
Shouldn't special characters be shown as special characters when I open them in Notepad++ and not as plain text UTF-8 codes?
Any help is much appreciated :))
Cheers
Martin
é is an HTML entity. For some reason the text is HTML formatted, which I wouldn't count as "plaintext"/flat files. The file may or may not be encoded in UTF-8 in addition to that, we don't know from the information given.
A file containing "special characters" (meaning non-ASCII characters) encoded in UTF-8 opened in a text editor which correctly interprets the file as UTF-8 looks exactly like the text it should look like, e.g.:
正式名称は、ISO/IEC 10646では “UCS Transformation Format 8”、Unicodeでは “Unicode Transformation Format-8” という。両者はISO/IEC 10646とUnicodeのコード重複範囲で互換性がある。RFCにも仕様がある。
Put this in a file, save it as UTF-8, open it in another application as UTF-8, and this is what the text should look like.
Yesterday I wrote some text in a notepad file which was full of Unicode characters and saved the file as ANSI. Notepad gave me some warning, which i clicked OK without reading it fully and closed notepad.
Today when I again opened the same text in notepad, I am seeing notepad full of ??? signs. I now understand that this happened because I saved Unicode data as ANSI text. Is there a way to retrieve this text back? May be using some hex-editor or so?
No. Certain characters cannot be encoded in certain encodings. "風" cannot be encoded at all in ISO-8859 or any other single-byte encoding, for example. Each ANSI encoding also can only encode a certain subset of all possible characters. It is simply not possible to store characters not defined in a particular ANSI encoding in that encoding, they're simply not defined there.
So, they're gone. You better pull out a backup.
I have tried a program called UTFCast Professional. It checkes the file encoding.
When I write code I use Sublime Text.
Random encoding
What I get is that some files are UTF8 and some files are ASCII/UTF8. It appears to be set random. All of them are set to "BOM: No".
Why is some files UTF8 and some ASCII/UTF8?
Is it possible that in some cases it does not know if it's ASCII or UTF8?
Should I be worried for future encoding problems? I have not have any so far.
(I prefer UTF8)
A plain text file does not in any way save what encoding it's in anywhere. Any program that purportedly tells you what encoding a file is in is by definition only giving you its best guess based on the content of the file. Now, since a file which contains only characters which are present in ASCII and is saved as UTF-8 is indistinguishable from a pure ASCII file, either answer is valid. Even Latin-1 and a large number of other answers would be valid.
So the answer why that program randomly outputs one or the other is because its detection algorithm triggers one or the other based on some characteristics of the file content. Only the program author can tell you exactly why. The file is encoded as UTF-8 without BOM. Whatever any application tells you it thinks it is is entirely up to that application.
I'm trying to save Word documents as plain text docs. Currently, some times the accents turn into other symbols (usually the same ones, for example: é turns into a theta). Other times it works fine. How do I prevent this?
Currently using the line:
save as active document file name FullDocPath file format format Unicode text
When I encounter this error, I can save the document using the dialog (selecting Western Mac OS Roman encoding...that fixes the problem.
The applescript Word dictionary mentions:
[text encoding unsigned integer] : Text encoding to use when saving out as text file
I have no idea if this is the piece I'm missing or how to utilize it (is there a set integer that designates Western Mac OS Roman encoding?)
Anyone have any ideas?
Try:
set wordDoc to choose file
do shell script "textutil -convert txt " & quoted form of POSIX path of (wordDoc as text)
Check out StefanK's solution using textutil
This is in response to your comment beginning "Thanks Stefan and bibadiak"
With .txt file formats is that there is no universally used way to specify the encoding of a file inside the file, so either the application has to guess, or you have to know the encoding and the application has to let you tell it.
AFAIK if you do not specify an output encoding when you use textutil to convert from .doc or .docx format to text, you get UTF-8. But Mac Word just does not seem to recognise that when you try to open it, either programmatically or in the UI.
So I think you need to do some mix of the following:
a. save in, and work with, a format that uses 16-bit Unicode encoding. Word should recognise that, certainly if the BOM is preserved
b. save to UTF and work with UTF elsewhere, but use textutil to do the conversion back to (say) .docx before you re-open the document in Mac Word
c. if all your characters can be encoded using Mac OS Roman, use e.g.
textutil -convert txt -encoding 30
to save, ensure you work only with that character set, and re-open with Word. (30 is the value of the APple NSString value NSMacOSRomanStringEncoding). I think textutil will fail to convert documents that contain characters outside the MacOS Roman set.
HI, I am creating a file like so.
FileStream temp = File.Create( this.FileName );
Then putting data in the file like so.
this.Writer = new StreamWriter( this.Stream );
this.Writer.WriteLine( strMessage );
That code is encapsulated in a class hierarchy but that is the meat and potatoes of it.
My problem is this. MSDN says that the default encoding for creating a file this way is UTF8. And when I write a french character such as é Textpad interprets the file as a UTF 8 file, but notepad++ says it's "ANSI as UTF8" or maybe it's an ansi file but is reading it as UTF8. When I create a file the same way without the french character both textpad and notepad++ read the file as an ansi file even though according to msdn it should be a utf 8 file still.
Which program should be trusted. Notepad++ or textpad - Notepad++ seems to be more consistant, but is still the oppossite to what MSDN says it should be. My problem is that we create files that get sent off to another company and depending on whether there are french characters the encoding seems to keep changing.
Or is there a better way to determine the encoding of a file. I've read about byte order marks and preambles but as far as I understand neither are guaranteed to be there.
We initially thought that all the files we were building were ansi. Also please note that both ansi and utf8 should handle the french characters appropriately as the characters are part of both character sets.
as far as i know, "ansi" character encoding is another name for ascii-us.
if there are no characters in the file that aren't in the ascii charset then the file is valid ascii and valid utf8, there's no way to distinguish them. so your program can write it as utf8 and any other program would be correct in seeing it as ascii (ansi) just as it would be seeing it as utf8.