It is my understanding that txt files do not have encoding information stored so text editors simply make educated guesses about encoding of a given text file and then display the file on screen using that guessed encoding. If the editor guessed right you get your text on the screen, if the editor guessed wrong, then you (sometimes) get gibberish. Am I getting this right so far?
Now on to my problem. I have my bank statements in a csv file. When I open it in MS Excel 14 (MS Office 2010), it recognises the encoding and displays the problematic work as "obračun". Great. When I open the file in Emacs 24.3.1, it fails to recognise the correct encoding and displays the problematic word as "obra鑾n". Not so great.
My question is: how do I tell Emacs which encoding the file is in?
Thanks.
From the Emacs Manual:
If Emacs recognizes the encoding of a file incorrectly, you can reread
the file using the correct coding system with C-x RET r
(revert-buffer-with-coding-system). This command prompts for the
coding system to use.
Give utf-16 a try.
Related
I use free pascal's chmcmd command to create chm file from hhp. After converting content goes right, but left pane side (tree) doesn't show russian characters. I tried to set charset at hhc file to cp1251. And saved file in windows 1251 encoding. After that it shows tree in russian right in cool reader but not in xChm. In windows it still doesnt work, only weird symbols. Utf-8 doesn't work at all.
The Microsoft CHM help format is very old and not maintained anymore. It wasn't created with Unicode in mind and various tricks need to be done in order to be able to generate CHM files for certain encodings:
You Windows is setup in the target language of the help file
The content HTML pages must be created using the proper charset
I have an xml-file. When I open it with Emacs it displays chinese characters (see attachment). This happens on my Windows 7 PC with Emacs and Notepad and also on my Windows XP (see figure A). Figure B is the hexl-mode of A.
If I use the Windows XP PC of a collegue and open the file with Notepad there are no chinese characters but a strange character character. I saved it as txt-file and sent it by email to my Windows7-PC (see figure C). The strange character was replaced with "?". (Due to restriction I could not use the PC of my collegue and reproduce the notepad file with the strange character).
My questions: it seems that there are characters in the XML-file which creates problems. I don't know how to cope with that. Does anybody has an idea how I can manage this problem? Does it have something to do with encoding? Thanks for hints.
By figure B, it looks like this file is encoded with a mixture of big-endian and little-endian UTF-16. It starts with fe ff, which is the byte order mark for big-endian UTF-16, and the XML declaration (<?xml version=...) is also big-endian, but the part starting with <report is little-endian. You can tell because the letters appear on even positions in the first part of the hexl display, but on odd positions further down.
Also, there is a null character (encoded as two bytes, 00 00) right before <report. Null characters are not allowed in XML documents.
However, since some of the XML elements appear correctly in figure A, it seems that the confusion goes on through the file. The file is corrupt, and this probably needs to be resolved manually.
If there are no non-ASCII characters in the file, I would try to open the file in Emacs as binary (M-x revert-buffer-with-coding-system and specify binary), remove all null bytes (M-% C-q C-# RET RET), save the file and hope for the best.
Another possible solution is to mark each region appearing with Chinese characters and recode it with M-x recode-region, giving "Text was really in" as utf-16-le and "But was interpreted as" as utf-16-be.
For some reason, Emacs takes "UTF-16" in an xml file encoding attribute as big endian, while Windows takes "UTF-16" as little endian (like when exporting from Task Scheduler). Emacs will unknowingly convert LE to BE automatically if you edit and save an xml file. You can mouse over the lower left "U" to see the current encoding. encoding="UTF-16LE" or encoding="UTF-16BE" will ruin the file after saving (no BOM). I believe the latest version has this fixed.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?>
<hi />
The solution of legoscia using the possibility of Emacs to change encoding within a file solved my problem. An other possibility is:
cut the part to convert
paste in a new file and save it
open it with an editor which can convert encodings
convert the file and save it
copy the converted string and add (paste) to the original file where you cut the part to convert
In my case it worked with Atom, but not with Notepad++.
PS: The reason why I used this way is that Emacs could not open anymore this kind of corrupted files. I don't know why but this is another issue.
Edit 1: Since copy, paste and merge is cumbersome I found the solution how to open currupted files with emacs: emacs -q xmlfile.xml. Using emacs like legoscia suggested is the best way to repair such files.
I am writing some data as a xml file with ISO-8859 encoding.If I tried to open the file in notepad++.I can able to see the 'Â' character which is already present in the file.But if I tried to open the file in notepad the character 'Â' gets removed.Though I am very new to Encoding,I don't know why.Please suggest some reason for this.
This file is also get opened in browser with the 'Â' character.
Thanks in Advance
Windows notepad is a very basic editor, and has quite a number of limitations, one of which is the support it has for different encoding formats other than ANSI, Unicode and UTF-8. When editing files in other formats, it can give unreliable/unexpected results.
If you are handling files in different encoding formats, you are better off avoiding notepad altogether and using an editor (such as Notepad++) which has better support for multiple encoding formats.
For more information on how Windows notepad "guesses" at the correct format to use (with varying levels of success) see here
Bear in mind that other editors often use similar techniques to "guess" the format of a file, so it is often a good idea to check/set the encoding for a file manually (where possible) for less common encoding formats to ensure you get the correct results every time.
I created file with UTF-8 encoded content (using PHP fputcsv).
When I open this file in Notepad++ - characters are wrong (Notepad++ starts with ANSI encoding).
When I set Format->"Encode in UTF-8" from menu - everything is fine.
Im worrying, that Notepad++ can recognize encoding somehow, and maybe something is wrong with my file created with fputcsv? First byte or something?
Automatically detecting an encoding is not something that can be done accurately. It's pretty much essential that the encoding be specified explicitly. It can be guessed in some cases, but even then not with 100% certainty.
This documentation (Encoding) explains the situation in relation to Notepad++.
They also point out that the difficulty arises especially if the file has not been saved with a Byte Order Mark (BOM).
Given that your file displays correctly once you manually set the encoding, I would say there's nothing wrong with how you are generating and saving the file. The only thing you can check for is whether a BOM is being saved, which might improve the chances of Notepad++ being able to automatically detect the encoding.
It's worth noting that although it may help editors like Notepad++ identify the encoding more accurately, according to The Unicode Standard document, the BOM is not recommended.
You have to check the lower right corner of the Notepad++ GUI to see the actual enconding that is being used. The problem it's not that Notepad++ specific because guessing the right encoding is a big problem without any real solution so it's better to let the user decide what is the most appropriate encoding in each single case.
When you want to reflect the encoding of the text file in a Java program, you have to consider two thnigs: encoding and character set. When you open a text file, you see encoding under "Encoding" menu. Additionally look at the character set menu point. Under "Eastern European" you will find "ISO 8859-2", and under Central European "Windows-1250". You can set corresponding encoding in the Java program
when you look up in the table:
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/intl/encoding.doc.html
For example, for Cenntral European character set "Windows-1250" the table suggest Java encoding "Cp1250". Set the encoding and you will see the characters in program properly.
Is there a setting in UltraEdit that allows me to see the encoding of the file?
In UltraEdit, the encoding that is being used to -display- the file, is shown in the status bar at the right somewhere, together with the line-ending type in use, for example, "U8-UNIX". You can also manually set as what encoding the file has to be displayed. In version 10 this is under menu View -> Set Code Page. You can also -convert- the actual codepage of the file under menu File -> Conversions.
If the file does not have a BOM header, a couple of bytes at the start of the file indicating the encoding, the -actual- encoding of the file, can only be guessed. And even if the file has a BOM header, there can still be encoding issues.
All text editors do this, and some are better at it than others. I haven't done a comparision to see which is best at it. At the moment (2012), I know UltraEdit fails to detect UTF-8 and other variants in 1000 line (or longer) text files if the first UTF-8 character only appears later in the document. It also fails to show the encoding properly when you set it manually.
Notepad++ is also not great at detecting it, but when you know the encoding, you can set it manually.
Sublime Text is, as far as I know, best at detecting the encoding, also in large files.
I think there are also some very good command line tools out there, ported from GNU to Windows, to detect encoding. My bet would be that that's going to be the best option.