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.
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This may sound like a stupid question. I typed some Chinese characters into an empty text file in VS code text editor (default utf8). Then I saved the file in an encoding for Japanese: shift JIS, which apparently doesn't cover all the characters I have typed in.
However, before I close the file, all Chinese characters are displayed properly in VS code. Now after I closed the file and reopened it using shift JIS encoding, several characters are displayed as a question mark ?. I guess these are the Chinese characters not covered by the Japanese encoding?
What happened in the process? Is there anyway I can 'get back' the Chinese characters that are now shown in ?? I don't really understand how encoding works in this scenario...
Not all encodings cover all characters. (Unicode encodings, in principle, do, but even they don't have quite everything yet.) If you save some text in an encoding which does not include all characters in that text, something has to give.
Options:
you get an error message,
nothing saves at all,
the characters which cannot be included are silently dropped,
the characters which cannot be included are converted to some other character (such as the question mark).
Once that conversion is done, the data is lost, and cannot be recovered. Why not use UTF-8 or another Unicode encoding? (GB 18030 might be the best for large amounts of Chinese text.)
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.
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.
This question already has answers here:
How can I detect the encoding/codepage of a text file?
(21 answers)
Closed 7 years ago.
When I have a file created in Vim/Linux with :set fileencoding=utf-8 and have diacritics (as e.g. german umlauts) in the file, then calling up file myfile.txt results to myfile.txt: UTF-8 Unicode text. If I have no diacritics in the file, then the determination of the file encoding results to myfile.txt: ASCII text.
Why is that? And how can I determine safely, that a whole bunch of files is encoded correctly by using UTF-8 file encoding?
EDIT:
ASCII is 7-bit and is a subset of UTF-8. I want to know if my source files are encoded in UTF-8 so that they can hold diacritics sometime in the future. IMO this is not obvious and I like to find a way to determine this safely.
There is no generic and reliable way to find which encoding a text file use. Furthermore quite a few encoding are supersets of ASCII-7 (UTF-8, ISO 8859-*, ...)
In the case of UTF-8, one trick is to add an (otherwise unnecessary) BOM (Byte Order Mark) at the beginning of the file. In this case file displays something like :
some.txt: UTF-8 Unicode (with BOM) text
I think that for vim the option is : :set bomb
Unfortunately, while most editors understand the BOM, bash does not. Don't add it to shell scripts !
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.